Concentration of solutions problems are among the most important and at the same time one of the most challenging topics in chemistry. The aim of this study was to determine the sources of the difficulty that students often face when performing calculations related to concentration. The study involved 153 tertiary college students (food science,…

Demonstration shows are a widely used form of Informal Science Education. While there is evidence that the shows are highly enjoyable, little work has been done to investigate the cognitive impacts of these shows. This article describes the development and production of "The Boiling Point," a show that uses the structure of a play to…

A facile, discovery-based experiment is described that introduces aliphatic substitution in an introductory undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum. Unlike other discovery-based experiments that examine substitution using two competing nucleophiles with a single electrophile, this experiment compares two isomeric, competing electrophiles…

Implementing the case study method in a practical X-ray crystallography course designed for graduate or upper-level undergraduate chemistry students is described. Compared with a traditional lecture format, assigning small groups of students to examine literature case studies encourages more active engagement with the course material and…

BufCap TOPOS is free software that generates 3-D topographical surfaces ("topos") for acid-base equilibrium studies. It portrays pH and buffer capacity behavior during titration and dilution procedures. Topo surfaces are created by plotting computed pH and buffer capacity values above a composition grid with volume of NaOH as the x axis…

The objective of this article is to explain and provide rubrics for science and communication faculty as a means to help nonscience students, in basic science classes, understand that proper communication and presentation skills are a necessity in all courses and future walks of life.

This experiment was designed and successfully introduced to complement the nanochemistry taught to undergraduate students in a useful and interesting way. Colloidal Ag nanoparticles were synthesized by a simple, room-temperature method, and the resulting suspension was then used to study the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of methylene…

Caffeine (1,3,7-trimethylxanthine) is an alkaloid stimulant that is popular in beverages. Fluorescence-coupled methods have been used to measure the caffeine content in coffee, tea, soft drinks, energy drinks, and cosmetics. In this experiment, we have developed a method for detecting caffeine in beverages utilizing the effect of the caffeine…

While structure-property relationships are commonly developed in applications of physical organic chemistry to real-world problems at the graduate level, they have not been generally emphasized in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. For instance, the ability to modify the energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and the…

Quantification of the many constituents that make up our food, whether they are desirable (vitamins, antioxidants, nutrients) or undesirable (pesticides, toxins), is one of the most practical applications of chemistry. In this study, kombucha, a popular fermented tea beverage, was analyzed using acid-base titration and high-performance liquid…

We developed and validated a new instrument, called "Measuring Concept progressions in Acid-Base chemistry" (MCAB) and used it to better understand the progression of undergraduate students' understandings about acid-base chemistry. Items were developed based on an existing learning progression for acid-base chemistry. We used the Rasch…

This article reports on a study conducted in Croatia on students' understanding of scientific words and representations, as well as everyday words used in chemistry teaching. A total of 82 undergraduate chemistry students and 36 pre-service chemistry teachers from the Faculty of Science, University of Split, were involved. Students' understanding…

General chemistry and introductory chemistry students were presented with a laboratory exploration for the determination of the mass percent of copper in rock and mineral samples. They worked independently in the laboratory, which involved multiple lab (pipetting, preparing standard solutions by quantitative dilution, recording visible spectra…

The development of novel, high-yielding, and selective methodologies for the asymmetric synthesis of stereocenters is at the forefront of modern synthetic chemistry research. Organocatalysis can now be viewed as a viable alternative to the use of the sometimes toxic transition-metal catalysts. In this experiment, the simple synthesis of an achiral…

In this article, a bomb calorimeter experiment and subsequent calculations aimed at determining the strain energy of the cyclobutane backbone are described. Students use several butanol isomers instead of the parent hydrocarbons, and they manipulate liquids instead of gases, which makes the experiment much easier to perform. Experiments show that…