The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we…

Introductory courses in mathematics and physical sciences are challenging for students and often have lower success rates than other comparable courses. In online courses, this is compounded by students employing surface learning strategies. Furthermore, it has been shown that students often do not utilize learning materials that are provided in…

As COVID-19 spread across the globe, schools shuttered their doors and millions of students and teachers shifted to remote learning. This situation created significant challenges with regard to maintaining continuity, quality, and equity in education. At the same time, the very nature of the pandemic itself underscores the critical need to engage…

The College of New Jersey's Chemistry Department and School of Science have been strategically transforming our teaching, learning, and mentoring environments for over a decade through programs that are targeted toward "new majority" students: low-income, first generation, and historically marginalized races and ethnicities. Recently, we…

This communication reports the curriculum changes and how they worked when an upper-level experimental physical chemistry course had to switch from face-to-face to online teaching within a matter of days. Although several of the learning goals of the laboratory-based course could still be met in the online environment, others required…

Students who drop out of their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors commonly report that they lack skills critical to STEM learning and career pursuits. Many training programs exist to develop students' learning skills and they typically achieve small to medium effects on behaviors and performance. However, these programs…

This paper presents three case studies that examined the use of ClassTranscribe in a diverse set of undergraduate engineering classes in 2019 and 2020 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ClassTranscribe, a video viewing system designed with accessibility and learning in mind, was first presented to the ASEE [American Society for…

Limonite is the field term for a mixed assemblage of ferric oxyhydroxides, often containing nonferric silicate impurities. It is abundant on Earth's surface, possesses variable iron content, and is easily recognized by distinctive yellow and ochre hues. Limonite is a unique centerpiece for undergraduate chemistry laboratories because each sample…

A demonstration is described of electrophoretic separation of carmine and sunset yellow with a paper-based device. The channel in the paper device was fabricated by hand with a wax pen. Electrophoretic separation of carmine and sunset yellow was achieved within a few minutes by applying potential on the channel using a simple and inexpensive power…

In a brief article published in 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar made public an important astronomical discovery. In his article, the then young Indian astrophysicist introduced what is now known as the "Chandrasekhar limit." This limit establishes the maximum mass of a stellar remnant beyond which the repulsion force between electrons…

The solution of simple kinetic equations is analyzed without referencing any topic from differential equations or integral calculus. Guided by the physical meaning of the rate equation, a systematic procedure is used to generate an approximate solution that converges uniformly to the exact solution in the case of zero, first, and second order…

An introductory guide to deducing the mechanism of chemical reactions is presented. Following a typical workflow for probing reaction mechanism, the guide introduces a wide range of kinetic and mechanistic tools. In addition to serving as a broad introduction to mechanistic analysis for students and researchers, the guide has also been used by…

In order for undergraduate laboratory experiments to reflect modern research practice, it is essential that they include a range of elements, and that synthetic tasks are accompanied by characterization and analysis. This intermediate general chemistry laboratory exercise runs over 2 weeks, and involves the preparation of a Schiff base ligand and…

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) is commonly taught in undergraduate laboratory classes as a traditional method to analyze proteins. An experiment has been developed to teach these basic protein gel skills in the context of gluten protein isolation from various types of wheat flour. A further goal is to relate this technique to current…

The complex approximation is widely used in the framework of the Ligand Field Theory for explaining the optical properties of crystalline coordination compounds. Here, we show that there are essential features of these systems that cannot be understood with the usual approximation that only considers an isolated complex at the correct equilibrium…