Current study examined the effects of virtual and physical laboratory practices on students' conceptual achievement in the subject of electricity and their attitudes towards simple electric circuits. Two groups (virtual and physical) selected through simple random sampling was taught with web-aided material called "Electricity in Our…

This one-day workshop for pre-service teachers was aimed at implementing a uniquely designed and ready-to-implement chemical engineering curriculum in high school coursework. This educational and professional development opportunity introduced: 1) chemical engineering curriculum and career opportunities, 2) basic industrial processes and flow…

This is the start of a road map for the effective introduction of inquiry-based learning in chemistry. Advantages of inquiry-based approaches to the development of scientific literacy are widely discussed in the literature. However, unless chemistry educators take account of teachers' reservations and identified disadvantages such approaches will…

We present a user-friendly, data-driven Web site (http://thermal.gg.utah.edu/facilities/epo/) for a geothermal, climate change observatory that is educational for the general public, students, and researchers alike. The Emigrant Pass Observatory (EPO), located in the Grouse Creek Mountains in northwestern Utah, gathers both meteorological data…

This sequence of three guided-inquiry labs is designed for a second-semester general chemistry course and challenges students to discover basic theoretical principles associated with [superscript 13]C NMR, [superscript 1]H NMR, and IR spectroscopy. Students learn to identify and explain basic concepts of magnetic resonance and vibrational…

A scaffold was created for the explicit instruction of laboratory report writing. The scaffold breaks the laboratory report into sections and teaches students to ask and answer questions in order to generate section-appropriate content and language. Implementation of the scaffold is done through a series of section-specific worksheets that are…

Demonstrating how surface chemistry and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) control the macroscopic properties of materials is challenging as it often necessitates the use of specialized instrumentation. In this hands-on experiment, students directly measure a macroscopic property, the floatation of glass coverslips on water as a function of…

Food science laboratory courses are traditionally taught as a series of preplanned laboratories with known endpoints. In contrast, inquiry-guided (IG) laboratories allow students to ask questions, think through problems, design experiments, then adapt and learn in response to unexpected results. This study examined the effects of converting the…

In the current laboratory assignment, technical aspects of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are integrated in the context of six different bacterial outbreak scenarios. The "Enterobacterial Repetitive Intergenic Consensus Sequence" (ERIC) PCR was used to analyze different outbreak scenarios. First, groups of 2-4 students determined optimal…

In this paper we report on the use of two different light to frequency converters, four different light sources, three of which are novel and inexpensive, and a hand held digital multimeter with a frequency counter, suitable for making accurate and rapid determination of the optical inverse square law exponent of -2 to better than [plus or…

The implementation of an automated system based on the hot-wire technique is described for the measurement of the thermal conductivity of liquids using equipment easily available in modern physics laboratories at high schools and universities (basically a precision current source and a voltage meter, a data acquisition card, a personal computer…

The demand for empathetic health care practitioners requires an academic curriculum suited to that need. Here we describe a series of integrated activities that were designed to foster empathy in undergraduate health science majors. By combining content and pedagogical approaches from the humanities and sciences, we asked students to reconcile…

This article presents two integrated laboratory exercises intended to show students the role of [alpha]-amylases (AAMYs) in saliva and detergents. These laboratory practicals are based on the determination of the enzymatic activity of amylase from saliva and different detergents using the Phadebas test (quantitative) and the Lugol test…

In proteomics, complex mixtures of proteins are separated (usually by chromatography or electrophoresis) and identified by mass spectrometry. We have created 2DE Tandem MS, a computer program designed for use in the biochemistry, proteomics, or bioinformatics classroom. It contains two simulations--2D electrophoresis and tandem mass spectrometry.…

"The Chemistry of Perfume" is a lab-only course for nonscience majors. Students learn fundamental concepts of chemistry through the context of fragrance, a pervasive aspect of daily life. The course consists of laboratories pertaining to five units: introduction, extraction, synthesis, characterization, and application. The introduction unit…