Student preparation has been shown to be of appreciable importance to student success in laboratory components of science courses. To promote student engagement prior to each laboratory session, technique and content videos, online assessments, and additional methods aiming to decrease cognitive load have been put into effect. Edpuzzle allows for…

A new project-based laboratory (PJBL) was developed for general chemistry students to tackle the steps involved in chemical water quality analysis using an accessible, real-world hydrologic system (the lakes of the Lower Grand Coulee, Washington). This PJBL was developed in a joint general chemistry and environmental geology course by a…

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments.…

Physics teachers are often faced with the challenge of having to set up difficult experiments, or they have to consciously manipulate parameters in order to be able to demonstrate a phenomenon convincingly. Comprehensive laboratory courses are standard procedure in any study program for prospective physics teachers. However, many students, even…

Practical work as observation and experimentation are vital parts of science education. One way to accomplish this is by applying inquiry-based learning in laboratory activities. Inquiry enhances the development of scientific skills as well as the learning of the scientific concepts. In the present article, a laboratory activity was developed to…

Hands-on, inquiry-based laboratory activities are excellent opportunities to introduce first-year undergraduate students to the lab environment and to catalyze new interest in topics they may not yet know or be as enthusiastic about studying. We describe a multisession introductory laboratory activity that couples the research areas of medicinal…

A dual-function student-crafted instrument is described as part of a laboratory activity aimed to teach both the principles and practical aspects of absorption spectroscopy to secondary and introductory undergraduate students. Using minimal changes in an arrangement that is based on interlocking bricks and low-cost components, both a fluorometer…

In the Spring 2021 Organic Chemistry Lab class at Penn State Schuylkill, COVID-19 restrictions and uncertainty required a flexible plan. The first 4 weeks of 15 were fully remote, and videos of standard organic techniques were used, followed by an exam. In the next 5 weeks, some students were in the lab and some were remote. A document camera was…

Engaging students in scientific practices has become an important pedagogical component in STEM education, although its implementation in laboratories is still emerging. This paper uses three types of guiding questions to facilitate scientific practices in introductory and analytical chemistry laboratories. What makes our instructional model…

Laboratory studies are very important for science education but also involve various risks. It is possible to minimize these risks by providing a safe working environment. This study aims to determine the knowledge and views of secondary school students on laboratory safety and to identify their deficiencies in this regard. The survey method was…

Many physics projects recently designed for high school teachers use Arduino as the main tool for managing sensors and data acquisition. This is a low-cost integrated development environment programmed with a simplified version of the C++ language. In comparison, the Raspberry Pi 3 platform, which also allows for the design of physics projects,…

This experiment combines analytical techniques of solid-phase extraction (SPE) and gas chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC-QTOF-MS) to determine organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in river water as a means to develop and improve student understanding of the use of GC-QTOF-MS for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In…

Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (spring 2020), universities quickly moved to remote instruction. Our research during this time frame included investigating course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) in General Chemistry, and we found ourselves in the middle of a CURE study without any laboratory component (aka…

Organic electrosynthesis is an increasingly popular tool for driving and probing redox reactions. Recent advances in this field often employ an electrocatalyst to enhance the selectivity and efficiency of electrochemical reactions. A laboratory experiment was developed to introduce students to relevant mechanistic techniques in electrochemistry…

In an idealized General Chemistry Laboratory curriculum, students would hone their experimental design ability with practice encouraged by laboratory exercises designed to be open-ended. However, traditional General Chemistry Laboratory courses often lack opportunities for students to design their own experiments, instead opting to provide…