Students need to have basic understanding of scientific method during their introductory science classes and for this purpose an activity was devised which involved a game based on famous Monty Hall game problem. This particular activity allowed students to banish or confirm their intuition based on empirical evidence.

Although the majority of the teaching faculty at U.S. universities is composed of people who are scientific experts, research has found that most scientists do not have information about effective teaching methods (DeHaan 2005). Traditional lecture-style college science teaching does not reflect knowledge about best teaching practices based upon…

Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS or simply MALDI) has become ubiquitous in the identification and analysis of biomacromolecules. As a technique that allows for the molecular weight determination of otherwise nonvolatile molecules, MALDI has had a profound impact in the molecular…

DNA microarrays are microscopic arrays on a solid surface, typically a glass slide, on which DNA oligonucleotides are deposited or synthesized in a high-density matrix with a predetermined spatial order. Several types of DNA microarrays have been developed and used for various biological studies. Here, we developed an undergraduate laboratory…

To circumvent the problem of academic dishonesty through the mass administration of multiple-choice exams in college classrooms, a study was conducted from 2003 to 2005, in which multiple versions of the same examination were color coded during testing in a large-enrollment classroom. Instructors reported that this color-coded exam system appeared…

The stereochemical investigation is conducted to give students the combined experience of chemical synthesis of amines and N-heterocycles and structural stereochemical analysis using NMR spectroscopy. Students are introduced to the concept of topicity-stereochemical relationships between ligands within a molecule by synthesizing N,O-acetals.

This paper describes ongoing research investigating student approaches to quantitative and qualitative problem solving in physics. This empirical study was conducted using a phenomenographic approach to analyze data from individual semistructured problem solving interviews with 22 introductory college physics students. The main result of the study…

Treatment of d-fructose with methanol in the presence of acid as a catalyst gives a mixture of methyl-[beta]-d-fructopyranoside, methyl-[alpha]-D-fructofuranoside, and methyl-[beta]-d-fructofuranoside, which were separated on an ion exchange column and characterized polarimetrically.

In this interview Roald Hoffmann reveals aspects of his private life, from the great difficulties he experienced during World War II, to his personal beliefs. Hoffmann addresses questions about the meaning of laboratory work, teaching chemistry, representing chemical ideas, his philosophical quandaries, his poetry, and his view of atomic orbitals.…

In this laboratory experiment, students take environmental samples at various locations around the college campuses, take geospatial coordinates with a global position systems (GPS) unit, and map their results on a geo-referenced campus map with geographical information systems (GIS) software. Nitrogen dioxide air pollution sampling is used as an…

Competition experiments are a useful tool for preliminary study of the linear free energy relationship of organic reactions. This article describes a physical organic experiment for upper-level undergraduates to identify the rate-determining step of the Claisen-Schmidt condensation of benzaldehyde and acetophenone by studying the linear free…

This article describes the use of limits in topics that are usually covered in a high school advanced placement chemistry course or a first-year college chemistry course. Such an approach supplements the interpretation of the graph of an equation since it is usually easier to evaluate the limit of a function than to generate its graph. In…

The reactivity and orientation effects of a substituent are analyzed by using HPLC to determine the competitive nitration of the benzene-toluene and benzene-fluorobenzene mixtures. The results have shown that HPLC is an excellent instrumental method to use in analyzing these mixtures.

An acutely less toxic 2-bromobutane is used to develop a simple graphite-promoted procedure of alkylation of p-xylene. It is further demonstrated that aluminum chloride is not required, the need for aqueous workup is eliminated, waste solutions are not produced and the multiple use of the catalyst is allowed.

The CARBOHYDECK card game is designed to motivate undergraduate chemistry or biochemistry nonmajors to learn about isomerism of monosaccharides.