National initiatives to expand the aggregate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce reflect America's goals to increase global competitiveness. However, the aggregation of STEM stakeholders may elicit a "diffusion of responsibility" because individuals assume others are already acting. Here, we perform a longitudinal…

As worldwide energy shortages and environmental degradation increase, along with steady increases in population, current science and technology are confronted with many challenges to successfully sustain our society. Among the existing promising choices, photocatalysis has been widely considered as a potential solution to energy and environment…

This work discusses the design and implementation of two online case studies in a face-to-face general chemistry course. The case studies were integrated into the course to emphasize the need for science literacy in general society, to enhance critical thinking, to introduce database searching, and to improve primary literature reading skills. An…

High school students are generally uninformed about the benefits of enrolling in a full sequence of science courses, therefore only about a third of our nation's high school graduates have completed the science sequence of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. The lack of students completing a full sequence of science courses contributes to the deficit…

The importance of high-tech careers has risen as the international competitiveness of US students on tests of science and math has declined. The problem is compounded by a persistent inequity in STEM participation and achievement in the US across gender and racial and ethnic groups. Bridgewater State University's Student Retention Enhancement…

This study investigates the potential of five factors that may be predictive of success in college general chemistry courses: prior knowledge of common alternate conceptions, intelligence, scientific reasoning ability, proportional reasoning ability, and attitude toward chemistry. We found that both prior knowledge and scientific reasoning ability…

The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) laboratory instruction approach has been used successfully over a decade to engage students in laboratory activities. SWH-based instruction emphasizes knowledge construction through individual writing and reflection, and collaborative learning as a group. In the SWH approach, writing is a core component of…

A 2011 report by the Department of Education states that understanding how teachers use results from formative assessments to guide their practice is necessary to improve instruction. Chemistry teachers have goals for items in their formative assessments, but the degree of alignment between what is assessed by these items and the teachers' goals…

Word problems are math- or science-related problems presented in the context of a story or real-life scenario. Literature suggests that, to solve these problems, advanced reading skills are required, in addition to content-related skills in, for example, mathematics. In the present study, we investigated the relation between students' reading…

This study explored integrating formative assessment to a Chinese high school chemistry classroom, where the extremely high-stakes testing and Confucian-heritage culture constituted a particular context, through a collaborative action research. One researcher worked with a high school chemistry teacher in China to integrate formative assessment…

Research in chemistry education has highlighted a number of variables that predict learning and performance, such as teacher-student interactions, academic motivation and metacognition. Most of this chemistry research has examined these variables by identifying dyadic relationships through bivariate correlations. The main purpose of this study was…

Cooperative learning was employed as an instructional approach to facilitate student development of spectroscopy problem solving skills. An interactive online environment was used as a framework to structure weekly discussions around spectroscopy problems outside of class. Weekly discussions consisted of modified jigsaw-style problem solving…

The aim of this study was to create an instrument to measure elementary teachers' interest in teaching chemistry. The interest in chemistry teaching instrument (ICTI) was created to measure both the affective and cognitive components of interest. After establishing the face and content validity of the instrument, the internal consistency of the…

Much of our understanding of metabolic pathways has resulted from the use of chemical and isotopic labels. In this experiment, a heavy isotope of carbon, [superscript 13]C, is used to label the product of the well-known RuBisCO enzymatic reaction. This is a key reaction in photosynthesis that converts inorganic carbon to organic carbon; a process…

A short, semi-microscale synthesis of two 1,4-dihydropyridine drug analogues via a Hantzsch reaction is described, which is appropriate for a second-year undergraduate organic laboratory. Products are specifically chosen to highlight the biological relevance of this compound type while introducing the notion of a privileged structure.…