A laboratory experiment has been designed for teaching laboratories aimed at training students in the basics of spectroscopy in junior and senior level undergraduate chemistry courses. Despite the ubiquity of light-based tools in modern science, students often find it difficult to comprehend light and light-matter interactions. A portable…

Student engagement in evidence-based argumentation plays a central role in science education. These skills can be developed when identifying organic molecules from the spectroscopic data. Molecular structural analysis fosters deep procedural knowledge, as it involves (i) flexibly applying a set of procedures to extract information from spectra,…

A chemistry laboratory experiment is described to introduce undergraduate college students to membrane separation technology. This experiment combines a simple nanowire membrane fabrication and visually indicated molecule separation. The membrane is produced via coprecipitation synthesis followed by a filtration assembly process, which can be…

The ability to reason with representations is pivotal for successful learning in Organic Chemistry and is closely linked to representational competence. Given the visual nature of this discipline, this comprises competency in extracting and processing relevant visual information. With regard to the resonance concept, proficiency in identifying…

Education in organic chemistry is highly reliant on molecular representations. Students abstract information from representations to make sense of submicroscopic interactions. This study investigates relationships between differing representations: bond-line structures, ball-and-stick, or electrostatic potential maps (EPMs), and predicting partial…

The ability to extract structural information from a drawing of a molecule is key to being successful in organic chemistry. One source of difficulty for novices in interpreting structures is that hydrogens bound to carbon are represented implicitly in the often-used line-angle structures. Other representations that explicitly show hydrogens, such…

Teaching the three-dimensional structure of saccharides has consistently been a challenging aspect of organic chemistry courses, impeding students' ability to grasp more advanced topics in biochemistry and food chemistry. In this article, we designed and developed a novel d-glucopyranose model using 3D printing technology for the first time. This…

Organic molecules are invisible objects, but they can be visualized and manipulated by using molecular models. The object-based learning (OBL) approach, which is an educational tool developed for museums and collection items, is tailored and applied to a first-year bachelor course of organic chemistry. At the beginning of the course, each student…

The NMR spectrometer is a commonly used spectroscopic instrument that records resonance frequencies of nuclei present in molecular systems. While the NMR frequencies fall within the radio frequency regime for a given molecular system, they are presented in terms of chemical shifts in the audio frequency regime, thereby having the versatility to be…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected a large range of in-person education activities in Colombia. This created great limitations in academic performance for students with reduced access to communication technologies and deepened the educational gaps in the country. This was particularly true for sciences such as biochemistry. In Colombia, molecular…

Appealing to students' affect in academic settings, such as demonstrating chemistry's relevance to their life, is one strategy instructors may use to support students' in learning. This study investigates the types of connections that students make to organic chemistry when responding to an open-ended writing assignment. Students enrolled in an…

A mixture of salt water and isopropyl alcohol is immiscible, forming two separate liquids with the organic layer on top and aqueous layer on bottom. When universal indicator is added to such a mixture, all of the indicator compounds in the universal indicator preferentially dissolve in the alcohol--except for phenolphthalein at high pH. Mixtures…

Magnetic molecular models help students explore molecular structures and interactions. In this study, we investigated how pairs of students used magnetic models to explore hydrogen bonding and the 6-fold symmetry of snowflakes. Fourteen first-year students enrolled in a chemistry unit participated in pairs. Students' interactions with the magnetic…

The great development of high-throughput molecular biology techniques and the consequent generation of massive data have made Bioinformatics essential for undergraduate Bioscience students. The importance of this scientific discipline is evidenced by the huge number of specialized publications, tools, and databases available. Training in…

Chemistry students should learn not only the key concepts and processes of the discipline but also how they arise, are established, and develop over time. Undergraduate programs for chemistry teachers seldom include training in the history of chemistry to prepare future teachers to put concepts in a historical context. In schools, atom and atomic…