In this supplement to our second-year supercapacitor lab (Bringing Real-World Energy-Storage Research into a Second-Year Physical-Chemistry Lab Using a MnO[subscript 2]-Based Supercapacitor. "J. Chem. Educ." 2018, 95 (11), 2028-2033), we incorporate a color indicator as indirect evidence for the manganese oxide's pseudocapacitive…

An essential skill for success in upper-division physics curricula is the ability to work with and apply mathematical and physical concepts through Cartesian and non-Cartesian coordinate systems. These skills are most notably necessary in electricity and magnetism, wherein students must build and solve integrals and perform vector derivatives in…

Physics instruction for aspiring health care professionals, medical researchers, and biologists often fails to capture the interest of students. This is despite the many ways physics is used in research, diagnostics, and treatment. Universities are revising the introductory physics courses to be more relevant to pre-health students. Part of this…

Service teaching, through which core courses or modules are provided by a department other than the one administering the degree, occurs in universities worldwide, but there have been many reports of student dissatisfaction with their service-taught courses. The experiences of service teachers have received little attention and may help to suggest…

The ability to assess students' content knowledge and make meaningful comparisons of student performance is an important component of instruction. ACS exams have long served as tools for standardized assessment of students' chemistry knowledge. Because these exams are designed by committees of practitioners to cover a breadth of topics in the…

Connecting the thermodynamic definition of entropy, dS = dQ/T (Clausius's equation), with the statistical definition, S = k[subscript B] ln [omega] (Boltzmann's equation), has been a persistent challenge in chemical education at the undergraduate level. Not meeting this challenge results in students taking away the meaning of entropy in a vague…

The photoelectric effect is one of the key experiments taught during first- or second-year university and high school modern physics courses. It is usually the first experiment to introduce light quantization and the concept of photons as "packets of energy." Here, we want to point out a widespread mistake concerning the interpretation…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss ways that a chemistry course could reposition itself by adopting interdisciplinary approaches based on systems thinking and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as overarching frameworks, to give an overview of several challenges that chemistry in higher education is facing, and to discuss how those can…

Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly recognizing the importance of teaching computation to their students. We recently completed a national survey of…

Heat and enthalpy are challenging topics for general chemistry students because they are conceptually complex and require avariety of quantitative problem-solving approaches. Expert chemists draw on conditional knowledge, deciding when and under what conditions a certain problem-solving approach should be used. Decision-based learning (DBL)…

EXCEL spreadsheet algorithms were developed at Villanova University to efficiently and consistently retrieve information from ASPEN® flowsheets and used for grading work in senior design. The challenge is to take a large volume of data that is in the stream and unit operations reports and quickly and consistently calculate a list of key grading…

The study of gels and their properties is a compelling topic both technologically and scientifically, and should therefore be emphasized in chemistry and material science syllabuses. In the present laboratory experiment, we propose two experiences, aimed at introducing gelation and gel transport properties using silica gels made from sodium…

Our exponentially increasing knowledge base creates many new technology challenges. Academia must therefore respond emphatically. Educating rising professionals to successfully confront these future difficulties requires innovative curricula challenges. A successful adaptation integrates STEM program protocols into core courses. Embracing…

Given the importance of phylogenetic trees to understanding common ancestry and evolution, they are a necessary part of the undergraduate biology curriculum. However, a number of common misconceptions, such as reading across branch tips and understanding homoplasy, can pose difficulties in student understanding. Students also may take phylogenetic…

A laboratory exercise on the interaction between the herbicide pendimethalin (PM) and goat serum albumin (GSA), a carrier protein present in mammalian blood circulation, is described. Fluorescence spectroscopy was used to study the binding reaction between PM and GSA. Titration of a constant amount of the protein (GSA) with increasing ligand (PM)…