In the 2 day lesson presented in this article, students explain how ionic substances interact in solutions by developing and revising their own explanatory models. The lesson engaged students in three-dimensional learning through creating and revising their own models to explain the interaction of ionic substances and polar molecules in a closed…

Visualization of chemical concepts can be challenging for many students. This is arguably a critical skill for beginning students of biochemistry to develop, since new information is often presented visually in the form of textbook figures. It is recommended that visual literacy be explicitly taught in the classroom rather than assuming that…

Despite the number of university students who take courses in multiple science disciplines, little is known about how they perceive common concepts from different disciplinary perspectives and to what extent they recognize connections among their courses. This dissertation explores students' perceptions of their chemistry and biology courses…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

Carrying out classroom experiments that demonstrate Boyle's law and Gay-Lussac's law can be challenging. Even if we are able to conduct classroom experiments using pressure gauges and syringes, the results of these experiments do little to illuminate the kinetic theory of gases. However, molecular dynamics simulations that run on computers allow…

To improve polymer education for 9-12 and undergraduate students, a plastic electronics laboratory kit using polymer semiconductors has been developed. The three-module kit and curriculum use polymer semiconductors to provide hands-on inquiry activities with overlapping themes of electrical conductivity, light emission, and light-harvesting solar…

Jensen's scheme for the logical structure of chemistry is taken as reference to study the logical structure of physical chemistry. The scheme distinguishes three dimensions (composition and structure, energy, and time), with each dimension treated at one of the three levels (molar, molecular, and electrical). Such a structure places the outer…

An important cellular mechanism contributing to the strength and duration of memories is activity-dependent alterations in the strength of synaptic connections within the neural circuit encoding the memory. Reversal of the memory is typically correlated with a reversal of the cellular changes to levels expressed prior to the stimulation. Thus, for…

This paper attempts to show one of the ways history of chemistry can be teachable for chemistry teachers, it means something more than an undifferentiated mass of names and dates, establishing a temporal framework based on chemical entities that all students use. Represents a difficult equilibrium between over-simplification versus…

Although stereochemistry is an important topic in second-year undergraduate organic chemistry, there are limited options for laboratory activities that allow direct visualization of macroscopic chiral phenomena. A novel, guided-inquiry experiment was developed that allows students to explore chirality in the context of cholesteric liquid crystals.…

Identifying students' misconceptions and learning difficulties and finding effective ways of addressing them has been one of the major concerns in chemistry education. However, the chemistry education community has paid little attention to determining discipline-specific aspects of chemistry that can lead to learning difficulties and…

A laboratory experiment is described in which students measure the amount of cetirizine in allergy-treatment tablets based on molecular recognition. The basis of recognition is competition of cetirizine with phenolphthalein to form an inclusion complex with ß-cyclodextrin. Phenolphthalein is pinkish under basic condition, whereas it's complex form…

Among computational methods, DFT (density functional theory) and TD-DFT (time-dependent DFT) are widely used in research to describe, "inter alia," the optical properties of transition metal complexes. Inorganic/physical chemistry courses for undergraduate students treat such methods, but quite often only from the theoretical point of…

The binding constant and stoichiometry ratio for the formation of iron(II)-(1,10-phenanthroline) or iron(II)-o-phenanthroline complexes has been determined by a combination of a low-cost analytical method using a smartphone and a molecular modeling method as a laboratory experiment designed for analytical and physical chemistry courses. Intensity…

Astro Academy: Principia is an education programme developed by the UK National Space Academy for the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The Academy designed, constructed, flight-qualified and developed experimental procedures for a suite of physics and chemistry demonstration experiments that were conducted by ESA…