Organic synthesis in a modern research laboratory uses state-of-the-art equipment to provide inert atmospheres, track reaction progress, and facilitate the purification of intermediates. Such facilities are not available in a high school laboratory. In this paper, synthetic organic chemistry is taken back to basics: A four step total synthesis of…

Thermodynamics challenges teachers and learners. Its pervasiveness about nature, mathematical abstractness, nonnumerical relations, and complexity in applications can inhibit understanding and usage, especially by undergraduates. Perspectives are given about these obstacles, and some suggestions are made to enhance comprehension of the discipline.

Although students experience friction in their everyday life, they have difficulty understanding the scientific concept of friction. To solve this problem, various instructional suggestions have been made by researchers concerning the teaching of friction. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate science high school students' reasoning…

The main goal of this study is to present the effectiveness improvement of student's creative thinking skills using CBL implemented in STEM education and CBL combined with worksheet PSL. The STEM education perspective used in this study is a separate science discipline (Physics) that incorporates other disciplines. The research method used in this…

Developing students' creative problem solving skills should be one of the top goals in general education. One teaching model that was developed to increase students' creative problem solving abilities is the Real Engagement in Active Problem Solving (REAPS) model. This model was used as an intervention in classrooms in many studies. However, the…

A good understanding of ternary phase diagrams is required to advance and/or to reproduce experimental research in solid-state and materials chemistry. The aim of this paper is to describe the solutions to problems that appear when studying or determining ternary phase diagrams. A brief description of the principal features shown in phase diagrams…

Simulation educational technologies provide a convenient way to augment classroom learning in higher education. The University of Colorado Boulder has created many Physics Education Technology (PhET) computer simulations relevant to concepts in Sciences and Mathematics. There is a notable gap in the literature of simulation-based technologies,…

In the present study, the effects of STEM-based robotics applications on students' creativity and scientific attitudes in the Electricity Unit of 7th grade have been investigated using the mixed method's nested pattern. Sixty students, 30 of whom are the experimental group and the other 30 constitute the control group, attending a post-school…

This study investigates the effect of inquiry-based learning with socio-scientific issues on students' higher-order thinking skills in the first year based on chemistry topics. This study used a quasi-experiment design as a method. A sample of 96 students in three classes was selected and was divided into two groups. An experimental group used two…

Scholars have suggested that flipped learning can be enhanced by designing effective in-class learning activities to improve students' higher order thinking skills. Problem posing has been recognized as such a learning strategy that has great potential for improving students' higher order thinking skills. However, it has been reported as a…

Creating a culturally responsive (Ladson-Billings 1995) or culturally sustaining (Paris 2012) learning environment requires teachers making connections to students' experiences outside of school, allowing them to draw on what González, Moll, and Amanti (2006) refer to as students' "funds of knowledge," or the values, interests, and…

This paper extends prior work establishing an operationalized framework of mathematical sense making (MSM) in physics. The framework differentiates between the object being understood (either physical or mathematical) and various tools (physical or mathematical) used to mediate the sense-making process. This results in four modes of MSM that can…

We designed a rubric to assess free-response exam problems in order to compare thinking skills evidenced in exams in classes taught by different pedagogies. The rubric was designed based on Bloom's taxonomy and then used to code exam problems. We have analyzed historical and recent exam problems in both algebra-based and calculus-based exams. In…

This paper describes an inquiry-based integrated laboratory project for green synthesis, characterization, and applications of silver and gold nanoparticles. In this project, students were able to choose their choice of plant extract as reducing and stabilizing agents, and the students also designed their own experiments. This course gave the…

One desired outcome of introductory physics instruction is that students will develop facility with reasoning quantitatively about physical phenomena. Little research has been done regarding how students develop the algebraic concepts and skills involved in reasoning productively about physics quantities, which is different from either…