The purpose of this research is to determine the effects of different laboratory approaches on students' understanding of wave concepts. For this purpose, three experiments and experiment instructions have been designed for each of the three approaches (verification, hypothesis testing, and the 5E laboratory approach). Quantitative aspects of the…

Every instructor should know some easy examples of anharmonic oscillations. The rocking of an empty wine bottle or a slender beer glass is one of those: The angle is not a sinusoidal function of time and the period is not independent of the amplitude, not even for small amplitudes. But care has to be taken that the glass does not slip or rotate…

Electrochemistry is a significant area of analytical chemistry encompassing electrical measurements of chemical systems. The applications associated with electrochemistry appear in many aspects of everyday life: explaining how batteries work, how the human nervous system functions, and how metal corrosion occurs. The most common electrochemical…

In April 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted noticed that the needle of a nearby compass deflected briefly from magnetic north each time the electric current of the battery he was using for an unrelated experiment was turned on or off. Upon further investigation, he showed that an electric current flowing through a wire produces a magnetic field. In 1831…

In nature, water drops can have a large variety of sizes and shapes. Small droplets with diameters of the order of 5 to 10 µm are present in fog and clouds. This is not sufficiently large for gravity to dominate their behavior. In contrast, raindrops typically have sizes of the order of 1 mm, with observed maximum sizes in nature of around 5 mm in…

In a recent paper, Zable described an experiment with a near-spherical balloon filled with impure helium. Measuring the temperature and the pressure inside and outside the balloon, the lift of the balloon, and the mass of the balloon materials, he described how to use the ideal gas laws and Archimedes' principal to compute the average molecular…

A laboratory experiment has been developed to illustrate environmental and sustainability aspects, focusing on the wastewater treatment by means of superparamagnetic nanoparticles functionalized with humic acid. The experiment, conducted by a group of high school students, involves nanoparticle synthesis and minor characterization, followed by…

The importance of understanding and internalizing the scientific method can hardly be exaggerated. Unfortunately, it is all too common for high school--and even university--students to graduate with only a partial or oversimplified understanding of what the scientific method is and how to actually employ it. Help in remedying this situation may…

Biochemistry courses in the Department of Molecular Biology at the National University of Río Cuarto, Argentina, are designed for undergraduate students in biology, microbiology, chemistry, agronomy, and veterinary medicine. Microbiology students typically have previous coursework in general, analytical, and organic chemistry. Programmed sequences…

Teaching complex chemistry concepts such as kinetics using inquiry-based learning techniques can be challenging in a high school classroom setting. Access to expensive laboratory equipment such as spectrometers is typically limited and most reaction kinetics experiments have been designed for advanced placement (AP) or first-year undergraduate…

Carbon is at the heart of many of today's environmental challenges. It is the central element responsible for the structure and function of living systems--taken up by plants through photosynthesis and moving from plants to other organisms, soil, and the ocean and into the atmosphere. The imbalance of these connected biogeochemical…

In this paper we describe an experiment in a linear algebra course. The aim of the experiment was to promote the students' understanding of the studied concepts focusing on their definitions. It seems to be a given that students should understand concepts' definitions before working substantially with them. Unfortunately, in many cases they do…

Enquiry learning and teaching about the nature of science (NoS) is a key element of science education. We have designed an experimental setting for students aged 12-14 years to exercise enquiry-learning skills and to introduce students to the NoS aspects of creativity and imagination. It also illustrates the impact of carbon dioxide on the growth…

While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the cognitive tasks that students identify as engaging in during their UREs. We also use their many comparative…

The present paper focuses on the acquisition of hedging techniques by first-year undergraduate students at the University of Tokyo in Japan. One of the major difficulties faced by aspiring science writers lies in positioning their arguments in relation to the preexisting literature. This originates from the fact that writing in the field of…