Pigments, dyes, and transition-metal compounds are made in courses across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, but student characterization of these compounds' most striking features, their colors, seldom goes beyond verbal descriptions. Affordable, hand-held, fiber-optic reflectance spectrophotometers make it possible to advance students'…

Quadratic modeling problems are commonplace in high school mathematics courses; they typically situate quadratic patterns of change and their corresponding parabolic graph within real-world contexts. Traditional approaches to this type of problem lend themselves to making connections across different representations (e.g., Garofalo and Trinter…

For food research, control, and production, valid and trustworthy analytical data are important. Our practical chemical food safety course for engineers therefore uses real-life studies for the ease of understanding the concept and the needed requirements for high analytical quality in relation to enabling correct evaluation of chemical food…

This profile describes the AIChE Concept Warehouse (CW) website, a community developed, web-based tool to decrease instructional barriers and to help faculty implement concept-based active learning in class. The CW provides three distinct but complementary functions: (a) a content repository, (b) an audience response system and learning management…

Working with practicing teachers, this article demonstrates, through the facilitation of a statistical activity, how to introduce and investigate the unique qualities of the statistical process including: formulate a question, collect data, analyze data, and interpret data.

In 1919, Eddington and Dyson led two famous expeditions to measure the bending of light during a total solar eclipse. The results of this effort led to the first experimental confirmation of Einstein's General Relativity and contributed to create its unique and enduring fame. Since then, similar experiments have been carried out all around the…

This paper discusses a game that can be used for introducing the binary representation of integers in an interactive and fun environment. The game is introduced in the way it is presented in an undergraduate Discrete Mathematics class. Variations of the game are discussed, particularly its extension to base-three representation of integers. It is…

We describe an educational activity that can be done by using smartphones to collect data in physics experiments aimed to measure the oscillating period of a spring-mass system and the elastic constant of the helicoidal spring by the dynamic method. Results for the oscillating period and for the elastic constant of the spring agree very well with…

Probabilistic reasoning underpins much of middle school students' future work in data analysis and inferential statistics. Unfortunately for many middle school students, probabilistic reasoning is not intuitive. One specific area in which students seem to struggle is determining the probability of compound events (Moritz and Watson 2000). Research…

Students and instructors alike have lamented the nature of methods instruction in political science curricula. Existing research has presented a number of innovative approaches to engage students in this important learning enterprise, from blogging and simulations to data visualization and the use of clickers. This article builds upon this…

Despite holding wide-ranging experiences with constant velocity and non-zero acceleration, students wrestling with physical science concepts struggle to demarcate the two distinct characteristics of motion. In fact, this prior experience and loose familiarity with associated terminology often act as an obstacle toward a deep and robust…

This paper demonstrates a dynamic, collaborative, and dialogic strategy for guiding students (and experienced researcher teams) through rudimentary forms of visual analysis using draw-and-write datasets. The approach identifies five sequential stages of the visual analysis process and further delineates twenty activities therein. Akin to the…

Increasingly students, particularly those in the social sciences, work with survey data collected through a more complex sampling method than a simple random sample. Failing to understand how to properly approach survey data can lead to inaccurate results. In this article, we describe a series of online data visualization applications and…

The increasing availability of digital data in higher education provides an extraordinary resource for researchers to undertake educational research, targeted at understanding challenges facing the sector. Big data can stimulate new ways to transform processes relating to learning and teaching, and helps identify useful data, sources of evidence…

This article describes an exciting exploration-based activity in which students develop an alternative definition of factor that can help them solve problems like the one presented above. Students work in groups to collect data, analyze the data to make conjectures, and then spend a significant amount of time debating and justifying their…