Courses that are typically hands-on, like equine science, may be more challenging online, but there is a higher demand for online offerings. With an increase in students taking online equine courses, a review of teaching methods was conducted to determine students' preferred teaching tools in online equine courses. The survey was sent out to…

A comparative study on the performance and on the perception of two groups of students involved in a peer review activity on the writing of chemical laboratory reports is reported. The first group participated in a compulsory activity, while the second one participated on a voluntary basis. This study was aimed at determining whether the overall…

The COVID-19 outbreak represented a remarkable challenge in universities and colleges since it forced the transition from a face-to-face model in classrooms and laboratories to a remote, online model using computers, tablets, and cell phones. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the return to educational activities was a slow-paced…

The aroma volatile compounds in tomatoes are strongly linked to taste and flavor. Commercial tomato varieties, however, generally lack flavor. Tomato breeding programs have therefore started to focus on increasing the flavor-enhancing volatiles, which can be more easily altered than the sugar content. Analytical efforts that identify key flavor…

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many challenges undergraduate students face including their ability to manage stress. Poor stress management can contribute to poor academic performance and health outcomes; better wellness habits and stress reduction go hand-in-hand, as improved wellness habits reduce overall stress and expand positive stress…

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are a pedagogical model where a traditional undergraduate course is transformed into a research-intensive course, offering an alternative pathway to research for undergraduate students. Given the novel learning context of CUREs, there is a need to understand the learning that occurs and the…

Given the growing prevalence of computational methods in chemistry, it is essential that undergraduate curricula introduce students to these approaches. One such area is the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to chemistry. Here we describe a new activity that applies ML regression analysis to the common physical chemistry laboratory…

In case-based learning, students develop and apply course knowledge to solve tangible and "real life" problems. This practice can enhance student motivation and engagement in the analytical laboratory. In this application of case-based learning students analyze commercially available oils for CBD content. In the state of Texas anyone can…

Photochemical synthesis, in which light is used as an indispensable reagent, is recognized as a green technique for organic synthesis and has been paid extensive attention. In this laboratory experiment for chemistry classes, a photoinduced C-C coupling reaction is introduced, which can be conducted under mild conditions at room temperature.…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When disseminating curricula, typically only the physical curriculum materials are transferred from the instructor to another. However, left as artifacts in the curricula are a set of epistemological beliefs held by the creators and designers of the…

The magnetic switch is part of common low-cost devices such as window alarms. Its operation is based on magnetic properties of ferromagnetic material. The paper describes our experience with using window alarm device in a course called 'How things work', which is elective course for first year physics majors. Specifically, we report on the…

Column chromatography of photosynthetic plant pigments is a common experiment in introductory laboratory courses for science majors and nonscience majors alike. We report a simple, rapid, reproducible, and small-scale solid--liquid extraction of photosynthetic pigments from inexpensive, store-bought dried herbs that affords a dark-green extract…

Cosmetic chemistry is a prevalent part of everyday life, but there are very few undergraduate laboratories that explore this topic. Here, we present a laboratory exercise in which students use fizzing bath tablets (better known as "bath bombs") to learn about introductory kinetics. Students created their own bath bombs by combining…

The redox reaction between dioxovanadium(V) and oxalate is proposed as a suitable system to analyze the kinetics of a twostep reaction mechanism using UV-vis spectroscopy. First, the spectra of dioxovanadium(V) and its reduced counterpart oxovanadium(IV) are compared and explained using the crystal field theory. The change in absorbance can be…

The concept of an atom with an expanded octet, known as hypervalency, has persisted in the general chemistry curriculum, despite abundant theoretical work disputing its veracity. Here, the electronic structure of traditionally hypervalent molecules (H[subscript 2]SO[subscript 3], H[subscript 2]SO[subscript 4], PF[subscript 5], and SF[subscript 6])…