Among the new educational tools and new ways of teaching/learning of the last 20 years, educational approaches based on constructivism are of great interest because they offer the possibility for students to build scientific concepts from experimental observations. Cooking is truly a universal topic--it can be considered a true multidisciplinary…

Online teaching and learning as an electronically supported approach relies mainly on the Internet as the medium for knowledge transmission. The utmost efforts are being made so that learning will be possible, even during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also maintaining academic integrity. In this paper, we discuss the major steps taken…

The course design "Training OC" for training the application of basic concepts consists of four topics: formula language, structure-property relations, reaction mechanisms, and complex tasks that the students should solve with the conceptual knowledge they acquired in the first three topics. A main goal of the course was to enable the…

Over 40 years of research, concept maps have shown that they are beneficial for learning. However, much of this research has been conducted in laboratory settings. Although there are a few studies conducted in the classroom, there is little understanding of the instructional efficacy of using different types of concept maps. In a between-subjects…

In the resolution of problems in chemical kinetics and catalysis the mathematical models relate the independent variable that is usually time, with the dependent variable which is normally the concentration of a reactant. They conform to linear models, whose parameters such as the ordering to origin and the slope are kinetic parameters, applying…

Discussion forums are important components of online courses because of the collaboration and community they foster, and the language used within the discussion forums may be influential in this development. In particular, studying the gendered language patterns of discussion forums can help gain insight into students' state of mind and propensity…

Quality Teaching (QT) is a sought-after professional goal for educators and schools alike. It is easy to observe, harder to define, and hardest to understand how to achieve. This study attempted to identify QT amongst a select group (N = 6) of Boston-area award-winning high school chemistry teachers. Participants were selected based on having…

Evaluation of student written work during summative assessments is an important and critical task for instructors at all educational levels. Nevertheless, few research studies exist that provide insights into how different instructors approach this task. Chemistry faculty (FIs) and graduate student instructors (GSIs) regularly engage in the…

Background: Video lectures which include the teachers' presence have become increasingly common. As teacher enthusiasm is a nonverbal cue in video lectures, more and more studies are focusing on this topic. However, little research has been carried out on the interactions between teacher enthusiasm and prior knowledge when learning from video…

Practical work is a distinctive feature of school science and has close associations with scientific experiment and scientific methods as well. In this study, the nature of practical work was examined in the view of the diversity of scientific methods. Based on an analytical framework derived from Brandon's matrix consisting of four categories of…

We reported a redesign of a physical chemistry laboratory course (CHEM 166) for our chemistry majors at the University of Vermont carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. We started to teach this course after a curriculum reform, which split an upper-division undergraduate laboratory course into physical and analytical chemistry laboratories. To…

To test the hypothesis that students who complete remote online tests experience an 'online grade penalty', we compared performance outcomes of second-year students who elected to complete exams online to those who completed face-to-face, paper-based tests in an organic chemistry course. We pursued the following research questions: (RQ1) Are there…

Due to the COVID pandemic, the introductory course on organic chemistry was developed and conducted as an online course. To ensure methodical variety in this course, educational games and quizzes have been developed, used, and evaluated. The attendance of the course, and therefore also the use of the quizzes and games, was voluntary. The quizzes'…

Student affect is an important factor in the learning process and may be especially important in gateway courses such as organic chemistry. Students' recognition of the relevance of the content they are learning and interactions with their peers can support their motivation to learn. Herein, we describe a study focused on how Writing-to-Learn…

This study unearthed the prevailing attitudes and perceptions of Caribbean Higher Education Leaders towards online chemistry learning prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and puts forward a case for more formal training in e-leadership for Caribbean Higher Education Chemistry leaders. This is based on the findings of a mixed method study which showed…