The questions in the practice assignments given to students in the form of worksheets or other formats are often grouped by chapter, topic, or concepts. There is a great emphasis on categorization. Most of the end-of-chapter problems in chemistry textbooks are organized by sections. Although this was done with the intention of helping students…

Summative lab assessments probe student mastery over concepts, but conventional ones often result in decreased student engagement and confidence. If conventional summative lab assessments are replaced by accessible gamified evaluations, such as online escape rooms, this leads to improved student engagement and confidence. In this work, we adapted…

Perovskite solar cells have garnered exponential research interest due to their facile fabrication, solution processability, and low cost. However, there have been limited efforts to integrate this class of materials into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Therefore, we designed an integrated laboratory experiment in our upper-division…

Presented is a project-based learning (PBL) laboratory approach for an upper-division environmental chemistry or quantitative analysis course. In this work, a combined laboratory class of 11 environmental chemistry students developed a method based on published EPA methods for the extraction of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its…

The goal of the study was to improve high school students' problem solving performance as they worked with IMMEX, an online chemistry problem solving simulation. The intervention included brief text messages added to the simulation to encourage students to reflect on their problem solving strategies and to adopt more effective problem solving…

Recent assessments indicate that American students do not score well on tests of scientific problem solving, relative to students in other nations. IMMEX is a web-based virtual environment that provides students with opportunities to solve science problems by viewing information resources through a suite of menu options, developing a hypothesis…

Teacher research--often called "action research"--is an intentional and systematic inquiry into one's own classroom practice with the goal of improved student learning (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1993). In this article, the authors present a teacher research project undertaken to improve student understanding of the gas laws in a high…