A student experiment that uses QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe) methodology for extraction and HPLC for quantitative determination of tocopherols from seeds and nuts is described here. Chromatographic separation is achieved by using a pentafluorophenyl stationary phase which gives enhanced separation of the tocopherols…

Organic chemistry students often struggle with reaction mechanisms, particularly in how they are proposed and justified. In this activity targeting second year organic undergraduates, students used infrared spectroscopy (IR) to track the reaction progress of two distinct aldol reactions and used polarimetry to analyze the stereoselectivity of…

In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children's design processes. This type of fixation, which we named: "concept fixation," causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking…

Representing conceptual change is challenging. Claims that conceptual change has occurred are sometimes based on data from a small number of probes given over a relatively long interval. Data collected in this way do not allow short-lived variability to be distinguished from more stable conceptual change and can lead to mistaken conclusions about…

Quantum mechanics has proven to be a challenging subject for instructors to teach and conceptually difficult for students to understand. A major source of the difficulty is the lack of everyday experience that quantum mechanics can be related to and the change in thinking required in transitioning from deterministic classical mechanics to a…

This article is the first in a series of activities that discusses some interesting relationships with triangles. Brian Sherman shows how to find five centres for a triangle--the circumcentre, the incentre, the orthocentre, the centroid and the nine-point centre, with four of the five to be found on the Euler line. With these centres, he shows…

Here we advance the proposal that in addition to the importance of emotion words, the dynamics of allostatic regulation play a central role in emotion concept development. We argue for a comprehensive extension of constructed emotion theory to emotional development. To do so, we emphasize possible mechanisms for emotion concept differentiation…

The aim of this article is to advise readers that natural numbers may be introduced as ordinal numbers or cardinal numbers and that there is an ongoing discussion about which come first. In addition, through several examples, the authors demonstrate that in the process of answering the question "How many?" one may, if convenient, use…

When driving on a sunny day, one can sometimes observe a small solar spectrum in the rearview mirror of a vehicle. The formation of this "rainbow" results from the prism-like structure of the rearview mirror. Our investigation of this phenomenon reveals that the resulting spectrum is formed in a manner similar to the way a rainbow is…

This article deals with serious game design methods. More specifically, it focuses on the following question: is there any universal series of steps to design a serious game? Or is the availability of several different design methods unavoidable? To try to answer this question, we will study a corpus of ten design methods suited to Serious Games.…

Two themes emerge from studies of the development of symbolic understanding; that development proceeds through multiple levels of understanding prior to full and reflective knowledge of the representational function of pictorial symbols, and that development is founded upon individual cognitive and social cognitive proclivities as well as on…

A set of criteria defining bullying behaviour (an intention to harm, repetition, and power imbalance) has been applied to enable generalisation of research findings. However, few studies have examined whether this fits with the experiences and understandings of young people. This qualitative study investigated 20 youth's (14-17 years old)…

In this paper, the SOLO taxonomy is used to identify different levels of student understanding of the statistical concepts associated with sampling distribution. This study was part of a research project investigating students' conceptual understanding of concepts of hypothesis testing taught with the support of simulation learning activities. The…

Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson,…

Electricity, especially the flow of current, is a challenging topic for students of all ages. This study conceptualizes students' explanation of electric current as a cluster of knowledge elements. These clusters, in turn, represent students' mental models of electric circuits. Thus, this study aims to identify and characterize students' mental…