There is widespread interest in diversifying and decolonizing the chemistry curricula in higher education. However, this is not reflected in the curricula taught to students prior to coming to university. We describe the results of an online survey of 185 secondary school/college teachers and students (>18 years) and, separately, 79 members of…

Most chemistry students struggle with interpreting and understanding NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectra and the general concepts of NMR spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy seems to be difficult to both teach and learn. Therefore, the corresponding courses should be investigated in more detail. We conducted a survey with N = 39 German university…

Hands-on experiments and teacher-based demonstrations are two standard teaching methods in secondary school when teaching chemistry in the laboratory. The available literature on these two teaching methods focuses on students' academic achievement. Most of this literature reports inconsistent results, and few studies examined teachers' and…

Academic misconduct is a serious issue among college students, and integrating academic ethics into major courses is expected to help prevent, dissuade, and respond to this issue. With the widespread adoption of flipped classrooms in higher education, it is necessary to explore effective ways to integrate academic ethics into flipped major…

This study aims to assess the effect of experiential learning coupled with thinking-based learning (TBL) pedagogy in developing higher-order thinking skills. We utilized OLabs, a virtual lab, as a mode of experiential electronic-learning for the topic "chemical reactions." Online experimental activities, embedded with thinking-based…

A key part of the practice of chemistry is the analysis of chemical composition, including through gravimetric analysis and spectrophotometry. However, the complexity of doing multiple calculations to obtain analytical evidence, such as that required to determine an empirical formula, presents a challenge if such analytical methods are to be…

This paper explores how the culture within a Danish university study programme affects students' aspirations of becoming a high school chemistry teacher. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews to describe and analyse the culture of the programme. In the analysis we foreground the case of two students to understand their…

Despite institutional reform efforts to increase use of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in undergraduate chemistry and STEM courses, didactic lecture remains the predominant mode of instruction. Research to inform these initiatives routinely focuses on drivers and barriers to EBIP adoption, with recent work investigating factors…

A goal in chemistry education research and teaching is to make chemistry education inclusive to our diverse students. Ethnography is one approach that can support this goal, because it supports researchers and educators in questioning what is considered ordinary by exploring chemistry as a culture. By exploring chemistry as a culture, we can…

Health-related career goals are popular among high school science students, yet few understand the application of chemistry and biology research to the field of medicine and its impact on society. In this five-day multidisciplinary summer camp, high school students learn about the real-world relevance of medicinal chemistry research and its…

The global Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated restrictions on indoor gatherings posed considerable challenges to the delivery of courses that traditionally have relied on hands-on learning in their laboratory components. Here, our experiences converting a senior instrumental analysis course to remote online learning in the…

The Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) melting assay intends to evaluate the unfolding, denaturation process of DNA secondary structures, and its stabilization using compounds known as DNA binders, some of which are highly specific for G-quadruplex DNAs versus duplex DNAs. First, students determined the melting temperature (T[subscript m])…

Recently, there have been calls to integrate systems thinking approaches into chemistry education in order to strengthen students' conceptual understanding, build their problem-solving capabilities, and prepare them to make informed, ethical decisions about globally relevant issues, such as sustainability. Unfortunately, implementation of systems…

An experiment to match five white solids with ascorbic acid, citric acid, potassium hydroxide, sodium chloride, and urea is reported here. This 4 h experiment is an integrated practice of two experimental techniques, calorimetry and titration. Students conduct an extensive literature search on the properties of the five compounds and plan the…

The drive in computational methods and more intuitive software has seen a rise in the number of publications in this area in recent years. Computational simulations can be found in many areas of science from computational biology and chemistry to fundamental physics. These may help synthetic chemists in their drug discovery endeavors and…