A computational laboratory experiment investigating molecular models for hexagonal boron-carbon-nitrogen sheets (h-BCN) was developed and employed in an upper-level undergraduate chemistry course. Students used the Avogadro user interface for molecular editing and the WebMO interface for the quantum computational workflow. Density functional…

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information.…

Students in chemistry often demonstrate difficulty with the principle of resonance. Despite many attempts to mitigate this difficulty, there have been few attempts to examine the root cause of these issues. In this study, students were assessed for their perception of Kekule structures based on perceptual learning theory, which is grounded in…

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is widely used to investigate the effect of education level on conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics but has only recently been scrutinized for gender effects and retention. This study examines both the gender gap in first year physics undergraduates compared to the gap for nonphysicists and the FCI…

From literature on understandings of the "nature of science" (NOS), we know that sometimes scientists and others that participate in teaching and mentoring in the sciences lack an informed view of the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline. In this study, we ask whether biologists who are also teachers or mentors for college…

The flow of materials and energy through society is an integral but poorly visible element of global sustainability agendas such as the Planetary Boundaries Framework and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG). Given that the primary activities of chemistry are to analyze, synthesize, and transform matter, the practice of chemistry has a…

Synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials yields opportunities for instruction of related topics in solution chemistry and materials science, as well as spectroscopy connecting to band theory, the "particle in a box" quantum mechanical model, and thermodynamics. In collaboration with an undergraduate research assistant, we have…

We discuss an investigation of the difficulties that students in a calculus-based university introductory physics course have with electric field and the superposition principle for the case of a continuous charge distribution and how that research was used as a guide in the development, validation, and evaluation of a tutorial on these topics to…

A phenomenographic study at a research university identified five categories of description for how STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) instructors conceptualize the design and redesign of undergraduate courses. These categories form a hierarchical outcomes space with increasing complexity of awareness of the phenomenon. The…

Herein we present a modified iodine clock experiment which replaces starch with cellulose paper. This provides the reaction with a white solid surface in which color change can be clearly observed and reduces reagent amounts required to 540 µL per group. After data acquisition, students are required to calculate reaction orders and the reaction…

Process analytical technologies (PATs) are used in the pharmaceutical and other industries to monitor chemical processes in real-time with analytical instrumentation. Each PAT analyzer brings its own advantages and disadvantages to the process, and multiplexing PAT analyzers can be advantageous as they can provide confirmatory measurements and…

In this article, we describe how the Gaussian Gun, a simple configuration of magnets and ball bearings, can be leveraged to connect ideas from physics to representations and ideas that are central to chemistry and challenging for students to learn. In particular, we show how the Gaussian Gun, an arrangement of ball bearings and magnets, models…

Thermodynamics challenges teachers and learners. Its pervasiveness about nature, mathematical abstractness, nonnumerical relations, and complexity in applications can inhibit understanding and usage, especially by undergraduates. Perspectives are given about these obstacles, and some suggestions are made to enhance comprehension of the discipline.

A significant challenge for the global community is the increasing demand for clean and renewable energy technologies. However, a lack of knowledge of these technologies threatens to impede their adoption. The development of cheap, effective, and easy-to-use chemical and electrochemical storage technologies is crucial if countries are to move away…

Electrostatic potential energy is a topic of great difficulty for many students. In this paper, we empirically test the utility of two approaches for laying a foundation for developing an understanding of energy in an electrostatic context, with interdisciplinary relevance. We examine student responses to a question about how the potential energy…