Plants can store the chemical energy required by their developing offspring in the form of triglycerides. These lipids can be isolated from seeds and then converted into biodiesel through a transesterification reaction. This second-year undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory experiment exemplifies the conversion of an agricultural energy…

Traditional and state-of-the-art techniques were combined to probe for various lipid classes from egg yolk and avocado qualitatively and quantitatively. A total lipid extract was isolated using liquid-liquid extraction. An aliquot of the total lipid extract was subjected to transesterification to form volatile fatty acid methyl esters suitable for…

Atomic orbitals are a theme throughout the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, and visualizing them has been a theme in this journal. Contour plots as isosurfaces or contour lines in a plane are the most familiar representations of the hydrogen wave functions. In these representations, a surface of a fixed value of the wave function ? is plotted…

Hodgkin and Huxley's (5) revealing the origins of cellular excitability is one of the great triumphs of physiology. In an extraordinarily deft series of papers, they were able to measure the essential electrical characteristics of neurons and synthesize them into a quantitative model that accounts for the excitability of neurons and other…

Despite high enrollments and budget cutbacks affecting many programs, students still need design experience which prepares them for a globally competitive workforce. We demonstrate that team design projects can be threaded across the curriculum even at large institutions with high departmental student to faculty ratios (~50:1). We assessed student…

The laboratory notebooks of physics undergraduates taking two second-year practical courses were audited to discover whether they had used feedback comments in their subsequent coursework. Ninety-five per cent of the 37 students on the first course and 100% of the 14 students on the second course whose work was audited had used feedback. The…

The formation and the hydrolysis of organic salts produced by the titration of a 0.1 M solution of the following amines: methyl-, dimethyl-, trimethyl-, ethyl-, diethyl-, and triethylamine with a 0.1 M solution of acetic, chloroacetic, and dichloracetic acids are studied. The pK[subscript b] of the amine and the pH at the end point were determined…

This paper describes an investigation into student reasoning about potential energy in the context of introductory electrostatics. Similar incorrect reasoning patterns emerged both in written questions administered after relevant instruction and in one-on-one interviews. These reasoning patterns are also prevalent in responses to questions posed…

When organic chemistry students encounter competing reactions, they are often overwhelmed by the task of evaluating multiple factors that affect the outcome of a reaction. The use of a decision tree is a useful tool to teach students to evaluate a complex situation and propose a likely outcome. Specifically, a decision tree can help students…

Precipitation of barium phosphate from aqueous solutions of a barium salt and a phosphate salt forms the basis for a number of conclusions drawn in general chemistry. For example, the formation of a solid white precipitate is offered as evidence that barium phosphate is insoluble. Furthermore, analysis of the supernatant is used to illustrate the…

In Saatdjian, E., Lesage, F., and Mota, J.P.B, "Transport Phenomena Projects: A Method to Learn and to Innovate, Natural Convection Between Porous, Horizontal Cylinders," "Chemical Engineering Education," 47(1), 59-64, (2013), the numerical solution of natural convection between two porous, concentric, impermeable cylinders was…

The Covalent Bond Classification (CBC) method provides a means to classify covalent molecules according to the number and types of bonds that surround an atom of interest. This approach is based on an elementary molecular orbital analysis of the bonding involving the central atom (M), with the various interactions being classified according to the…

It is essential to teach students about experimental design, as this facilitates their deeper understanding of how most biological knowledge was generated and gives them tools to perform their own investigations. Despite the importance of this area, surprisingly little is known about what students actually learn from designing biological…

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over two academic sessions. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we find…

To support teaching and learning in the advanced placement (AP) chemistry laboratory, the College Board published a laboratory manual, "AP Chemistry Guided-Inquiry Experiments: Applying the Science Practices," in 2013 as part of the redesigned course. This article provides a discussion of the rationale for the existence of the manual as…