Recently, topical products advertising cannabinoid ingredients have gained popularity. Consumers are seeing an increase of commercial products containing ingredients from hemp oil to cannabidiol (CBD) due to health benefit claims. Cosmetic products containing cannabinoids are currently not regulated at the federal level. A laboratory experiment…

Oxidation reactions are critical components of the synthetic toolbox taught to undergraduate students during introductory organic chemistry courses. However, the oxidation reactions discussed in the undergraduate curriculum are often outdated as many organic chemistry textbooks emphasize chromium-based oxidants that are no longer in regular use by…

A laboratory experiment has been devised to train new graduate trainees in the safe and controlled handling of air-sensitive organometallic reagents using Schlenk lines, high vacuum pumps, liquid nitrogen traps, and cannula transfers. The reaction involves the formation of air-, moisture-, and thermally sensitive 2-pyridyllithium, generated in…

The field of biosensors is a burgeoning area of research and employs a large number of chemistry graduates. The impact of strip tests in detecting coronavirus was palpable during the recent COVID-19 pandemic and will further drive the biosensor industry. Despite their common usage, a coherent introduction to the basics of sensing remains missing…

The use of the thermodynamic formalism in the investigation of biochemical reactions constitutes one of the key analysis in bioenergetics, and the first step in such analysis is the selection of the adequate reference state. For biochemistry majors, thermodynamic analysis based on the chemical reference state is used in Physical Chemistry courses,…

One of the memories of my freshman year at Amherst was a lecture in the required physics/calculus course in which Arnold Arons quoted Isaac Newton on standing on the shoulders of giants. Now that I have spent my physics career, I still use the same quote, but now apply it to the eponymous apparatus that has been designed by the giants in our field.

Fundamentals of Macroscopic Chemical Analysis is a newly developed foundation-level course that integrates concepts from traditional physical and analytical chemistry courses. The course was designed to serve majors in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology as well as pre-health professional students. The main goal of this course is to develop the…

A two to three period analytical chemistry experiment has been developed which allows second year students to explore chemical color tests used to detect adulterated pharmaceuticals. Students prepare several paper analytical devices (PADs) to generate positive and negative controls antibiotics, along with cutting agents such as starch and chalk.…

Higher education biology is often imagined, perceived, and described as having reached gender equality in terms of who gets to participate in disciplinary practices. However, like any other natural science discipline, higher education biology is a world whose landscapes are shaped by (re)productions of historical, cultural, and social norms. We…

Physics education has been identified as one of the public sectors that are mostly influenced by technological developments. This paper adopted the quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design to assess the effects of multimedia-aided technologies (MAT) on undergraduate students' performance in quantum physics (QP) at the University of Rwanda…

Over a decade has passed since faculty members' goals for the undergraduate chemistry instructional laboratory were first investigated on a large, national scale in the United States. This study revisits these goals, using data from a 2022 national survey of chemistry faculty members in the United States (n = 521) to investigate current…

The association between student motivation and learning, and changes in motivation across a course, were evaluated for students enrolled in one-semester foundation-level inorganic chemistry courses at multiple postsecondary institutions across the United States. The Academic Motivation Scale for Chemistry (AMS-Chemistry) and the Foundations of…

In theory, there is broad agreement among science education stakeholders that supporting the achievement of scientific literacy is crucial for citizens to make informed and critical decisions about socioscientific issues (SSI). Likewise, it is widely held that argumentation is an important component of scientific literacy. In practice, however,…

The Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach to learning and teaching holds as one of its core tenets that students should learn physics by engaging in the same processes through which physicists develop new knowledge. One key skill necessary for this is hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this study, we explored how the…

Undergraduate courses such as biochemistry were prompted to embrace online distance learning triggered by the incursion of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study worked to help solve the issues and concerns related to teaching biochemistry as a foundational course for dental and other health-sciences programs in the status of the educational system.…