Upper-division physics students solve partial differential equations in various contexts in quantum mechanics courses. Separation of variables is a standard technique to solve these equations. We investigated students' solutions to midterm exam questions and utilized think-aloud interviews. We also applied a framework that organizes students'…

The free radical chlorination of an alkane experiment is often used in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum to introduce students to the free radical mechanism, substituent effects, intermediate stability, and the relative reactivity of radicals. In this experiment, students monochlorinate multiple alkanes and analyze the reaction mixture using…

Organic Fanatic is a free-of-charge quiz-based mobile application game that encourages students to test their abilities and enhance their learning of organic structure and reactivity through a fun, arcade-style interface. Students can attempt a total of 270 multiple choice questions, choosing from a possible 1080 associated answers that can be…

Thermodynamics and kinetics are key topics in the chemistry curriculum that pose challenges to students across a range of educational levels. These struggles arise from the complexity and mixed representations inherent to the topics. Additionally, while thermodynamics and kinetics are related, students struggle to make conceptually correct…

Internationalization of university curricula is the main reason why the number of bilingual teaching practices (BTPs) in university courses is on the rise around the world. This article reports the perceptions of this type of practice from 70 science students (43 females and 27 males, 17-24 years old) from a Colombian university. A questionnaire…

COVID-19 pandemic is a disaster and prolonged crisis that has disrupted the education of millions of students with the closure of schools and universities in world-wide. This hard situation rises the necessity to develop a new teaching method to solve the problem of the massive disruption specially to practice work access. The goal of this paper…

A social semiotic lens is used to characterise aspects of representational competence for a discipline such as physics, to provide science teachers with a practical suggestion about how student learning might be organised to develop representational competence. We suggest that representational competence for some areas of science can be…

Cognitive scientists have recommended the use of test-enhanced learning in science classrooms. Test-enhanced learning includes the testing effect, in which learners' recall of information encountered in testing exceeds that of information not tested. The influence of incentives (e.g., points received) on learners who experience the testing effect…

We describe the development and in-class evaluation of a quantum interactive learning tutorial (QuILT) on quantum key distribution, a context which involves an exciting application of quantum mechanics. The protocol used in the QuILT described here uses single photons with nonorthogonal polarization states to generate a random shared key over a…

Instructional labs are being transformed to better reflect authentic scientific practice, often by removing aspects of pedagogical structure to support student agency and decision making. We explored how these changes impact men's and women's participation in group work associated with labs through clustering methods on the quantified behavior of…

A bridge course intended to ease the transition from Organic Chemistry I to II was designed for a January term that spans 2 weeks and features sharply focused topics courses. In the first week, key topics from Organic Chemistry I are revisited to ensure that students have a firm foundation on which to build. During the second week, a selection of…

Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is one of the most commonly used analytical techniques for the measurement of metals in environmental matrices. However, one of the drawbacks of ICP-OES is interference, viz., spectral and nonspectral (due to transport effects) interference. In this simple laboratory experiment,…

Keto-enol tautomerism is a special example of structural isomerism. In this experiment, 6-chlorofulvene is predominantly yielded during the chlorination reaction of 6'-hydroxyfulvene with POCl[subscript 3] in the presence of DMF. The high regioselectivity of this reaction is dominated by intramolecular hydrogen-bonding and steric hindrance,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a need for social distancing measures in public spaces and will have an important impact on university level teaching going forward. Remote methods to complete laboratory related activities are a potential means of students achieving practical credit while still isolating or social distancing. We outline the…

An escape room uses a game-based active learning approach to develop students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an immersive environment. An escape room was developed to provide an innovative method to reinforce concepts in chemical bonding for a first-year general chemistry course. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was…