Polymer chemistry is essential within chemical education because of its applications in academic and industrial research, materials science, and across engineering disciplines. Teaching polymer chemistry principles early on in the undergraduate curriculum allows students to find connections between chemistry and real-world applications and can…

For the past dozen years, the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill has been developing a unique, survey-level astronomy curriculum, primarily for undergraduate students, with the goal of significantly boosting STEM enrollments on a national scale, as well as boosting students' technical and research skills. Called "Our Place In…

Optimization of experimental conditions in chromatography is recognized as a wear-and-tear process involving hundreds of experiments in order to maximize the number of separated compounds for each sample. The critical thinking skills and practices entailed cannot be achieved with students in a conventional lecture class. This report provides a…

Shadows produced by sunlight reflected from convex surfaces can be very well defined. This article provides an explanation for this phenomenon as well as a demonstration/lab activity for students to investigate properties of shadows made from sunlight reflected by a curved surface.

This work aims to describe the socio-technical network of a Chemistry laboratory in the school "Professora Maria do Rosário Castaldi", a State Center for Professional Education in the city of Londrina, Brazil, taking the translation theories proposed by Bruno Latour as motivation. The observation data were either recorded in audio or…

It is a commonly accepted notion that people take different approaches in learning. Although attention has been given to learning styles as one of the determinants of learning performance, there is are limitations to the inferential approach to understanding the impact of learning styles on learning outcomes. The purpose of this study is to…

Plant nitrogen nutrition is an essential topic in biology that should be included in scientific education. Nitrogen availability is one of the primary limiting factors for plant growth, and these organisms are the primary support for the pluricellular terrestrial life, since they are the fundamental group of autotrophs. For this reason, the use of…

The implementation of an integrated approach to upper-level undergraduate chemistry laboratory instruction that incorporates student choice both in the selection and sequencing of the experimental work is presented. The approach involves combining laboratory work in several traditional subdisciplinary areas of chemistry in a single course.…

In order to introduce the concept of covalent organic frameworks (COFs), an important class of predictable crystalline porous polymers, an integrated laboratory experiment for advanced organic chemistry students is reported. The importance of these kind of polymers and their multiple applications are presented as a part of key concepts in polymer…

An experiment for the undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory involving a method for the isolation of eugenol from cloves has been developed. The experiment employs microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) of the essential oil from whole cloves using aqueous ethanol and the subsequent isolation of eugenol by acid-base extraction. The MAE allows for…

This work presents an outline for a full-quartile design-based learning laboratory-based course suitable for final year Bachelor's students. The course has been run for 5 years in the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. The course attempts to provide a complete laboratory experience for its students, including an authentic research…

Synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials yields opportunities for instruction of related topics in solution chemistry and materials science, as well as spectroscopy connecting to band theory, the "particle in a box" quantum mechanical model, and thermodynamics. In collaboration with an undergraduate research assistant, we have…

Process analytical technologies (PATs) are used in the pharmaceutical and other industries to monitor chemical processes in real-time with analytical instrumentation. Each PAT analyzer brings its own advantages and disadvantages to the process, and multiplexing PAT analyzers can be advantageous as they can provide confirmatory measurements and…

Although hands-on laboratory experiments are traditionally used in schools, virtual laboratories have entered today's classrooms, due to their specific affordances. In this study, we compared the effect of using hands-on and virtual laboratories in isolation to two different combinations on middle school (7th grade) students' acquisition of…

Chromatography is a ubiquitous technique in analytical chemistry, and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is the industry standard for quantitation of components in solution mixtures. However, demonstrating the principles of liquid chromatography to undergraduates via HPLC-based experiments often proves ineffective because of the fully…