This work presents an immersive molecular simulation tool (Manta) based on virtual reality technology, which enables students to explore "real" molecular structures and chemical reactions on-the-fly. Manta can work as a virtual classroom and even a playground for chemistry education, where students learn the progress of chemical…

Many conversations surrounding improvement of large-enrollment college science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) courses focus primarily (or solely) on changing instructional practices. By reducing dynamic, complex learning environments to collections of teaching methods, we neglect other meaningful parts of a course ecosystem…

Background: Active learning used in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses has been shown to improve student outcomes. Nevertheless, traditional lecture-orientated approaches endure in these courses. The implementation of teaching practices is a result of many interrelated factors including disciplinary norms, classroom…

Equal access to an instructor's time and attention can be a barrier experienced by many underrepresented minorities. An instructor's own biases will determine the nature of their interaction with students, and even well-meaning instructors can interact with students in differential ways, which might prevent certain students from having access to…

The current popularity of flipped learning may be attributed to its reported successes in bringing about enhanced learner engagement and positive learning outcomes. This study aims to improve our understanding of flipped learning (FL) outcomes by examining factors of learner engagement, academic capability, and epistemological beliefs. Data were…

High school students learn the basic voltaic and electrolytic cell concepts during their last year prior to entering an undergraduate teacher-education science degree. During the 4 years of university, students complete a sequence of topics designed to build on conceptual understanding presented in previous years. At the end of their degrees,…

Historically, undergraduate anatomy and physiology (A&P) has been a challenging course for incorporating conceptual learning techniques due to large class sizes and an emphasis on content and terminology. The project utilized the Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) strategy to create short activities based on real-world scenarios that incorporated…

Learning through games in general and educational escape-rooms in particular requires participants to be creative and critical thinkers, work in collaboration with others, formulate an array of thinking strategies, and be familiar with media and technology. A specially designed chemistry-themed escape-room was built as an alternative learning and…

After the sudden transition to remote instruction in the spring 2020 semester due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, physics lab instructors rapidly began to prepare for hybrid and/or fully remote instruction for the fall 2020 semester. In this paper, an asynchronous introductory physics lab course structure implemented at Saint Vincent…

Pre-laboratory tasks are a best practice for preparing students for learning in the laboratory. Virtual labs, which use virtual reality to place students in an emulation of a physical laboratory where they have the capacity to manipulate equipment and materials as approximations of scientific practice, are emerging as an alternative to the…

This project focused on integrating an international component into the one-semester biochemistry course, a required course for biology, chemistry, and forensic science majors at the institution. A driving question was how to integrate the international component into the course while showing direct relevance to the course and students' lives.…

In previous work we analyzed databases for 95 classes to show that the percent grade scale was correlated with a much higher student fail rate than the 4.0 grade scale. This paper builds on this work and investigates equity gaps occurring under both scales. By employing a "course deficit model" we attribute the responsibility for closing…

A national survey of chemists (n = 174) explored the self-reported format and focus of postsecondary inorganic chemistry instructional laboratory curricula. Multiple instructional laboratory course formats were observed, including stand-alone inorganic chemistry instructional laboratory courses, inorganic chemistry laboratory instruction as a…

Accuracy and precision are measures of experimental error and are fundamental to most chemical analysis laboratory classes. Assessment of accuracy and precision is often based on the comprehension of the results generated by students rather than on the quality of the data generated. This activity focused on developing a chemical analysis…

A physical chemistry lab for undergraduate students described in this report is about applying kinetic models to analyze the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and obtain the reproduction numbers. The susceptible-infectious-recovery (SIR) model and the SIR-vaccinated (SIRV) model are explained to the students and are used to analyze the…