How do scientists make inferences for something they cannot directly observe? The Black Box approach seems ideal to help students understand how scientists work. Black Boxes are sealed units; their interior is not accessible. The effort to determine their possible content (internal structure) demands successive modifications in hypothesis,…

Providing students with opportunities to build, and test and revise ideas, can help them develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In this article, the authors describe how core measurement and geometry concepts were embedded within a "Model It!" task. They replicate an industry-based, interdisciplinary problem, but only…

Colleges are becoming increasingly diverse, including strengthening representation of students with disabilities in STEM (Science, Teaching, Engineering, and Math) fields; however, representation still lags behind national trends. To adapt to this changing demographic and improve representation, STEM college professors must be prepared to grant…

In this article, we present a hierarchical model for teaching scientific thinking to gifted students. This article follows up on an article published 40 years ago in this journal. The problem now, as 40 years ago, is that gifted students often are taught science courses at a more intensive level, but without their truly learning how to think…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the greatest challenges faced for a very long time. However, it has also presented educators with novel opportunities for teaching, none more so than in science. There are the obvious links between COVID-19 and the body of scientific knowledge that curriculum designers think educators should help students to…

A class of 18 students attending the last year of an Italian high school was divided into groups and performed the extraction of pigments contained in hibiscus tea. Each group worked at a different temperature and carried out multiple extractions using distilled water as a solvent. By means of UV-vis spectroscopy it was possible to determine the…

A Sonogashira experiment was transformed into a problem-based learning platform for third-year undergraduate students. Given a target that could be synthesized in a single step, students worked in groups to investigate which method was the best for large-scale production. Through this practical scenario, students learn to conduct a literature…

A revised version of a traditional physical chemistry laboratory experiment has been developed to enhance student discussion in the laboratory and to improve students' connections between physical chemistry concepts and real molecular systems. In this experiment, students explore the keto-enol tautomerization of 2,4-pentanedione. However, unlike…

This paper is about an experimental problem on forced oscillations, which was given to 14-year-old primary school pupils at the Slovenian national (final) level of the physics competition in April 2019. At the time when the competition took place these pupils were approaching the end of the school year, when they encountered physics as a school…

Before students learn Kirchhoff's rules, they are typically taught how to solve "combined series-parallel" circuits. The method presented in many textbooks begins by drawing a series of simplified circuits, replacing series and/or parallel elements with their equivalent resistances, eventually reducing the circuit to a voltage source and…

With the benefits of low cost, energy efficiency, and environmental protection, photocatalytic hydrogen production is considered to be the most promising technology for the development of a clean and sustainable society. However, the utilization of photocatalytically generated hydrogen is not very common yet. Therefore, tertiary education urgently…

Using engineering design practices, student groups reverse engineer their own oil cleanup techniques and processes.

The content of research methods courses in tertiary education, as revealed by popular textbooks, tends to focus largely on procedural aspects of research investigations. Although following proper procedures is essential for reaching valid and reliable outcomes, there is another attribute of good quality research that is often missing from research…

We reported a redesign of a physical chemistry laboratory course (CHEM 166) for our chemistry majors at the University of Vermont carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. We started to teach this course after a curriculum reform, which split an upper-division undergraduate laboratory course into physical and analytical chemistry laboratories. To…

Many introductory physics courses begin with the teaching of motion and kinematics. This naturally leads to the use of constant acceleration equations to solve various problems involving common motions (free fall being a notable example). Students can sometimes get the impression that these equations are the only thing they need to remember in…