Students in grades 3-6 need to use increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills and strategies as they read and build knowledge across disciplinary content areas. Grounded in research, this book presents effective practices for integrating literacy instruction with literature, science, and social studies. Chapters address text selection,…

Creativity is an important twenty-first century skill often overlooked in higher education curricula, particularly in the sciences. Students need opportunities to practice and demonstrate their creativity and gain an awareness of the importance of such skills to enhance their graduate capabilities. One way is to embed creativity into course…

This paper describes the course outline for a three credit hour nonlaboratory course in Environmental Health Chemistry which was taught from 1981 until 2008 at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. The purpose of this paper is to share the lecture outline in the hopes that it might be useful to others who are preparing to teach…

Diffraction is an important phenomenon in physics. This paper describes using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to produce cross-sectional images of iridescent seashells. When seashell cross-sections are viewed in a SEM, regular structure is seen. Seashells are a good example of a biocomposite material and good natural objects for introducing…

For some scientific ideas, it is obvious to pupils as to why they are studied. For others, a bit more work is needed before their significance becomes apparent. The concept of 'historical significance', which is used in history teaching, can help children to appreciate the enduring importance of scientific discoveries and events. The pedagogic…

A gamified approach toward Viva voce was implemented in a postlab activity to evaluate students in teams. In a game-show manner, students in teams of three select from an array of anonymized options to reveal a random question. They then chose one member of the team to answer. The assessor evaluated the team by the side instead of facing the…

Graphing is an important practice for scientists and in K-16 science curricula. Graphs can be constructed using an array of software packages as well as by hand, with pen-and-paper. However, we have an incomplete understanding of how students' graphing practice vary by graphing environment; differences could affect how best to teach and assess…

Laboratory practical sessions are critical to scientific training in biology but usually fail to promote logical and hypothesis-driven reasoning and rely heavily on the teacher's instructions. This paper describes a 2-day laboratory practicum in which students prepare and analyze larval cuticle preparations of "Drosophila" segmentation…

A quantitative titration of the amount of magnesium hydroxide in milk of magnesia using only items purchased in grocery and retail stores is reported. Either vinegar or a solution of food grade citric acid serves as the titrant, while food dyes advertised as being extracted from natural sources provide the end-point indicator. An inexpensive,…

This practical is aimed at students who have been introduced to the tableting process, drug delivery systems, and dissolution. The student can design and manufacture a tablet investigating the effect of excipients and their role in tablet design and then generate a release profile of the tablet by using a dissolution apparatus, flow-through cell,…

A one-pot regio- and stereoselective synthesis of a dipyrromethane and a bis(indolyl)methane based on two consecutive reactions of nitrosoalkenes with pyrrole or indole, respectively, is described as an experiment to be carried out by upper-division undergraduate students in a laboratory classroom. Importantly, the ability of electrophilic…

This commentary provides an overview of abduction, also known as Inference to the Best Explanation, and argues that the term and relevant problem-solving methods should be adopted by chemistry educators. Abductive reasoning, especially within the context of science and medicine, continues to be an active area of exploration for philosophers and…

Electromagnetism (E&M) is often challenging for students enrolled in introductory college-level physics courses. Compared to mechanics, the mathematics of E&M is more sophisticated and the representations are more abstract. Furthermore, students may lack productive intuitions they had with force and motion. In this article, we explore the…

The understanding of the basic principles of chromatography is of high importance for chemistry, pharmacy, and biology students. In this paper, we present a free web application which can be used as a teaching tool to introduce chromatography to undergraduate students, using one of the simplest chromatography models: the plate theory.

The aim of the present work is to demonstrate the expediency of using information technologies on the study of Brownian motion. The importance of using such software as VirtualDub, Tracker and Google Sheets for the study of Brownian motion has been substantiated. This made it possible to determine the values that cannot be measured directly (the…