Previous work on chemistry outreach has mainly focused on designing and implementing demonstrations for outreach. Recent studies indicate student organizations are at the forefront of chemistry outreach and described their outreach practices and conceptual understanding of demonstrations. However, more research is needed regarding the experiences…

Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students' daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of…

The Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQ II) was developed to measure aspects of student motivation in college-level science courses. Items on the SMQ II are structured such that the word 'science' can be replaced with any discipline title (e.g., chemistry) to produce a discipline-specific measure of student motivation. Since its original…

The Teaching Internship is a credit-bearing program composed of undergraduate near peer instructors (teaching interns, or TIs) that offers supplemental assistance for students in the General Chemistry courses. With fellow undergraduates serving as a role model and student--faculty liaison, the benefits of near peer instruction have been…

The present pandemic has hurled organizations into a new social "norm"--and academia is not exempt. As a result, a novel pedagogy has evolved, demanding mechanisms of social distance teaching and learning be developed. This new era in education has learning institutions acquiring, adapting or even designing online STEM labs for physical…

The Hofmeister series is a recurring trend that ranks ions' abilities to influence various aqueous processes in solution. Herein, a set of project-based experiments was developed for students in an upper-level physical chemistry laboratory to investigate the specific ion effects on the thermodynamics of caffeine partitioning between aqueous and…

There is a growing need for workers with STEM-aligned training in the modern global economy, but a paucity of workers to fill these positions. One important contributor to this issue is low student persistence in STEM. Nontraditional science courses that utilize more active-participation and learning are attractive as tools to increase student…

Assessment in many Central- and Eastern-European countries is dominated by summative assessment (SA). Simultaneously, researchers and educators from western Europe and the US proclaim the formative assessment (FA) as an important element of the educational process and advise including it into curricula and everyday teachers' practice. The research…

Curriculum materials can play a major role in shaping teachers' thinking about instruction and content as well as serve as a support for teachers' learning. With the inclusion of engineering in NGSS, many teachers may be turning to existing curriculum materials to help them infuse engineering into their science classroom, especially when they do…

This article reports on the introduction of a simple, portable, low-cost, and hands-on spectral tool for first-year chemistry students to use inside the laboratory and its spontaneous dissemination outside of the laboratory. The Mini Spec is a refinement of the Schwabacher minispectroscope in terms of simplicity and language load on the students.…

A discovery-based undergraduate organic chemistry lab experiment has been developed in which students establish the diastereoselectivity of hydride reduction of the a-chiral ketone (±)-benzoin isopropyl ether to erythro and threo diastereomeric alcohols by two different reducing agents. Students achieve this goal by working collaboratively and…

Educators around the world have been challenged to adapt their teaching and pastoral care rapidly in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this article, we, the academic members of the Chemistry Education and Communication Research Theme (CECR) from the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, reflect on the challenges and successes…

The global COVID-19 pandemic required science educators to rapidly redesign their courses to instruct, support, and motivate students in a new remote learning environment. This adjustment was particularly challenging for courses with a laboratory component, where beakers and pipettes were exchanged for computer screens and keyboards. We present…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted teaching and learning worldwide during the Spring 2020 semester. Students and teachers had to shift to online teaching and learning in short order. With little time to prepare and inadequate training, faculty and students were thrust into a fluid situation, receiving training while teaching and learning. This essay…

In this communication the development of an online course on the topic "organic chemistry" for nonmajor chemistry students is described and discussed. For this online course, the existing classroom course was further developed. New elements such as podcasts, task navigators, and a forum for discussing the solving of tasks or problems…