Improving interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is crucial to widening participation and success in STEM studies at the college level. To understand how classroom and extracurricular interventions affect interest, it is necessary to have appropriate measurement tools. We describe the adaptation and revalidation of a…

The lack of knowledge about how to effectively spread and sustain the use of research-based instructional strategies is currently a significant barrier to the improvement of undergraduate physics education. In this paper we address this lack of knowledge by reporting on an interview study of 35 physics faculty, of varying institution types, who…

A range of factors can lead to situations where university courses have to be taught with a very small number of students. In this paper, we report on our experiences of a chemistry course that was especially designed to encourage learning in small groups of students (four to five per course). The course design included inquiry-based approaches,…

The purpose of this study was to understand the factors that support the adoption of active learning teaching strategies in undergraduate courses by faculty members, specifically in the STEM disciplines related to geoscience. The focus of the study centered on the context of the department which was identified as a gap in evaluation and…

There is increasing interest in science curricula that engage students in scientific practices to deepen their understanding of the core ideas of the field. There are, however, few examples of their designs or assessments available for use as guides for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of particular designs. We offer a summary of our…

We review previous research on the teaching and learning of thermodynamics in upper-level, undergraduate settings. As chemistry education researchers we use physical chemistry as a context for understanding the literature. During our synthesis four themes of research emerged: factors that influence student success in learning thermodynamics,…

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…