Titration is an important experimental skill that every chemistry educator and learner must master. Titration is often the method of choice in the science laboratory courses in secondary and postsecondary schools. During acid-base titration, chemistry learners are always told about salt formation. However, a practical visualization of the salt…

A simple synthesis of fluorescent carbon quantum dots from lemon juice is described to introduce advanced high-school students and undergraduate college students to nanoparticle synthesis and quantum dots. The synthesis is based on the carbonization of lemon juice using only a hot plate stirrer. Column chromatography is used to separate different…

Educational research has found that students have challenges understanding thermal science. Undergraduate physics students have difficulties differentiating basic thermal concepts, such as heat, temperature, and internal energy. Engineering students have been found to have difficulties grasping surface emissivity as a thermal material property.…

To provide a research-like experience to upper-division undergraduate students in a biochemistry teaching laboratory, isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) is employed to determine the binding constants of lysozyme and its inhibitors, N-acetyl glucosamine trimer (NAG[subscript 3]) and monomer (NAG). The extremely weak binding of lysozyme/NAG is…

Researchers, instructors, and funding bodies in biology education are unanimous about the importance of developing students' competence in experimental design. Despite this, only limited measures are available for assessing such competence development, especially in the areas of molecular and cellular biology. Also, existing assessments do not…

A prior study showed that students best make predictions about the outcome of opening a valve between two flasks containing a fluid or vacuum when they view both a demonstration video and a particulate animation, but the study showed no influence from the order in which these visualizations were used. The purpose of this current research was to…

A robust and reasonably simple experiment is described that introduces students to the visualization of nanoscale properties and is intended for a first-year laboratory. Silver nanoprisms (NPs) that display different colors due to variation of their plasmonic absorption with respect to size are prepared. Control over the size of the silver…