[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Common models of curricular development in physics education research (PER) have typically involved a hierarchical relationship between researchers and students, where researchers lead the design and testing of curriculum for students. We draw from work…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members' ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and…

COVID-19 has besieged academic institutions worldwide. As countries closed their international borders and imposed lockdowns, faculty have faced unprecedented challenges in finding alternative modes of teaching and assessment as replacements for the traditional face-to-face classes. In this piece, we describe the journey of the chemistry…

Faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at the University of New England (UNE) have recently transformed introductory and advanced chemistry curricula by embedding the high impact practice of undergraduate research. Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have provided experiential learning opportunities for over 272…

As numerous varsity campuses remain closed during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, educators must look for suitable digital tools to conduct lessons and engage learners online. In this report, we discuss how to structure the online lessons using the Community of Inquiry framework (CoI). The CoI was applied to the university elective course…

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Albright College changed its classroom courses to an online format starting at the middle of the semester. This communication describes the transformation of the remaining semester for the lecture of the general chemistry course for majors. Video, ungraded and graded quizzing activities, and discussion…

Background: The Classroom Observation Project employs direct observations of geoscience teaching across the USA using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) to quantify the use of reformed teaching practices. We report on 345 RTOP observations used to evaluate the extent of teaching reform when curricular materials developed as part of…

Science is rapidly changing with vast amounts of new information and technologies available. However, traditional instructional formats do not adequately prepare a diverse population of learners who need to evaluate and use knowledge, not simply memorize facts. Moreover, curricular change has been glacially slow. One starting goal for curricular…

Drug design and development requires collaboration among scientists with diverse expertise. In early-stage drug design, establishment of promising drug candidates requires integration of structure-based molecular design with biopharmaceutics and ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) principles. Much of this work is…

Open-ended problem-solving skills have been identified as employable skills, which undergraduate students will need to have in order to cope with real-life problems in their workplaces after graduation. However, the development and assessment of these skills have been inconsistent across courses offered in universities. This research examined…

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems and characterizing differences in expert and novice problem solving. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of "transitioning novices," students who have completed an introductory…

We developed a three-dimensional motion tracking system that displays trajectories as augmented reality in real time on a tablet device. The features of this system are as follows: (1) the three-dimensional trajectory can be observed from any direction. (2) Velocity and acceleration can be visualized as augmented reality. The device consists of an…

This work describes a simple talking calorimeter for the visually impaired based on the Arduino Uno without any shield. An electronic interface was designed using a Wheatstone bridge, a thermistor, or an operational amplifier (opamp). The temperature values are communicated by a loudspeaker connected to pulse-width modulation (PWM) digital output…

This communication describes the actions undertaken to translate the chemical crystallography course at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, from face-to-face to online instruction, as well as the emerging challenges encountered during this unprecedented time. As part of the global efforts to respond to the recent disruptions to teaching, our…

The pandemic COVID-19 has brought the closure of schools of all levels and all universities in Italy, since early March 2020 up to the end of the teaching period (first half of June 2020). However, almost all universities guaranteed the continuity of educational and professional courses by using several distance education modalities. The purpose…