When characterizing students' item-solving strategies, methods such as interviews and think-aloud protocols are often used. However, these measures provide limited information about sub-or preconscious signals and cognitive processes that also affect students' item-solving strategies and abilities. A growing number of researchers in chemical…

In an effort to offer modern and engaging senior design projects, as well as to improve ABET student outcome achievement, students were tasked with proposing their own design project idea for potential use as a senior project. Survey results from two cohorts have indicated that the majority of the students felt they achieved targeted ABET student…

This article addresses two gaps in the literature related to science department chairs: the axiological relationship between the chair and science, the subject, and the perceptions of the chair with respect to teaching and learning within their departments. In this work, axiology is used to understand how the chair's values toward the subject…

Calls for reform to instructional labs mean many instructors and departments are facing the daunting task of identifying goals for their introductory lab courses. Fortunately, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) released a set of recommendations for learning goals for the lab to support lab redevelopment. Here we outline the…

New learning strategies try to extend the use of common devices among students in physics lab practices. In particular, there is a recent trend to explore the possibilities of using smartphone sensors to describe physics phenomena. On the other hand, the study of the moment of inertia by the use of the torsion pendulum is a typical example in the…

Within medical education a reduction in curriculum time for subjects, such as anatomy puts pressure on educators to ensure the same learning outcomes are conveyed in less time. This has the potential to impact negatively on student experience. Near-peer teaching (NPT) is often praised as an effective revision tool, but its use as a frontline…

BYOL (Bring Your Own Lime), a novel laboratory experiment, is introduced in this paper. Students are encouraged to bring affordable household and grocery store chemicals into the classroom. The Bring Your Own Chemical (BYOC) concept demonstrates to students that food and household products are chemicals too. Citruses are often used to highlight…

A method for using electronic structure calculations to predict the standard molar enthalpy of combustion for hydrocarbons is presented. In this approach, simple geometry optimizations can be used to accurately compute the enthalpy of combustion within 3% of the experimental value using Hartree-Fock, MP2, or virtually any functional in density…

Recent developments in the sociology of education highlight the importance of the school as a site for the transformation of students' everyday knowledge into a more ordered and systemised form that provides the means for the development of creative conceptual higher order thinking. However, in recent times there has been a shift towards a…

Gay-Lussac's law states that the pressure of an ideal gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature if the volume is constant. Students observe this relationship by taking measurements on the pressure of gas in a flask or metal sphere at different temperatures and then extrapolate the data to estimate absolute zero. In our college…

Through problem solving especially in the chemistry courses, individuals are required to solve difference types of problems both in traditional and innovative ways, and to reveal different points of views. Both correct results and correct units are achieved through the conversion factors. The fact that the teacher candidates approach problem…

Many teachers do not notice, or do not understand, the chemistry going on in and around their homes and hence do not point it out to their students. Thus they miss out on an important motivating experience. This article gives a few random examples, most of them well within the understanding of students at key stages 3 and 4 (age 11-16). From…

This article argues that we need to make use of our everyday experiences when introducing concepts in chemistry that are often obscure. It uses reaction rates as an example and explores a common misconception related to the explanation of the effect of rising temperature on the rate of slow reactions.

Learners' curiosity is among the affective domains of learning that has a great potential to take learning to higher levels and meet the demands of the 21st-century teaching and learning process. This paper assesses how hands-on activities performed using learning materials from learners' immediate environment can enhance learners' curiosity in…

Colleges and universities are learning to provide relevant virtual lab experiences for students due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even schools attempting in-person instruction often need to utilize virtual experiences for students absent due to quarantine or illness. Much of biochemistry is amenable to molecular visualization and/or computational…