The benzoin condensation of benzaldehyde is a staple of the undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory, introducing the current topic of nucleophilic carbene organocatalysis. Our procedure makes notable improvements to current practice, including the elimination of solvent waste and an "18-fold reduction of reaction time." We have…

The imine condensation reaction is commonly addressed in second semester organic chemistry classrooms as imines and their derivatives are found in many pharmaceutical scaffolds and biological and catalytic processes. Despite this, imine condensations are still absent from many organic chemistry laboratory curriculums. The work discussed here…

To help educators deliver their physiology laboratory courses remotely, we developed an inexpensive, customizable hardware kit along with freely available teaching resources. We based the course design on four principles that should allow students to conduct insightful experiments on different physiological systems. First, the experimental setup…

Incorporating forensic applications into chemical education serves as an effective strategy for engaging college students and equipping them with the skills necessary to become valuable in the workforce in relevant fields. For instance, learning how to extract controlled substances from biological specimens in a laboratory course is essential for…

Pulsed field gradient nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is used to estimate the size of quantum dots (QDs) produced in a simple, fast, small-scale synthesis. This upper-division laboratory experiment teaches the basics of QD synthesis and pulsed field gradient NMR, a powerful technique for measuring diffusion coefficients in solution. The diffusion…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise for improving physics education research that uses machine learning. In this study, we compare the application of various models for conducting a large-scale analysis of written text grounded in a physics education research classification problem: identifying skills in…

Laboratory exercises focused on protein quantification are frequently conducted in traditional undergraduate biochemistry laboratory curriculum. The laboratory course described here is designed to provide students with experience in measurement of protein content in milk powder by moving reaction boundary titration (MRBT), a new rapid technique…

Digital learning environments such as virtual laboratories have been proposed to augment or even replace conventional forms of teaching in recent years. While there is some evidence on comparable learning outcomes between real and virtual labs, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of virtual labs as compared to conventional face-to-face…

Current laboratory-based practical classes are arranged so that all students can complete the required activities on time. With this system there is no incentive for students to optimize the time they spend in the laboratory or have awareness of whether they are conducting the activities in a timely manner. However, the acceptable timeframes for…

This paper examines the effectiveness of adding an online component to the general chemistry laboratory in which students view prelaboratory instructional materials through online videos prior to completing general chemistry laboratory activities. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compared the performance of 1089 general chemistry students who…

A comparative study on the performance and on the perception of two groups of students involved in a peer review activity on the writing of chemical laboratory reports is reported. The first group participated in a compulsory activity, while the second one participated on a voluntary basis. This study was aimed at determining whether the overall…

Asking students to explain why phenomena occur at a molecular level is vital to increasing their understanding of chemistry concepts. One way to elicit students' mechanistic reasoning and guide construction of knowledge is through Writing-to-Learn (WTL), which is a promising approach for students in organic chemistry courses. In the design of WTL…

The expectations within higher education to improve online STEM courses have continued to increase. The pressure to do so particularly pertains to the lower-level introductory courses that act as gatekeeping courses to various STEM-related majors. Rather than working alone to improve their courses, more instructors for these courses pair with the…

Categorizing the various levels of protein and nucleic acid structures is a relatively straightforward concept students understand quickly when shown representative structural images. However, keeping in mind the idea of primary, secondary, and tertiary structure proves more difficult when students are in the laboratory setting simply looking at a…

The Beer-Lambert law is a fundamental relationship in chemistry that helps connect macroscopic experimental observations (i.e., the amount of light exiting a solution sample) to a symbolic model composed of system-level parameters (e.g., concentration values). Despite the wide use of the Beer-Lambert law in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum…