In science classes, students usually learn about the law of definite proportions by the oxidation of copper. However, common procedures usually do not lead to proper results. This leads to confusion among the students because their experimental results do not fit to the theoretical values. Therefore, we invented a new procedure for this experiment…

A high-school third-year or undergraduate first-semester general chemistry laboratory experiment introducing simple-cubic, face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, and hexagonal closest packing unit cells is presented. Latex balls and acrylic resin plates are employed to make each atomic arrangement. The volume of the vacant space in each cell is…

This research revealed that metal ions with different charges could significantly affect the viscosity of aqueous sodium carboxylmethylcellulose (CMC) solution. On the basis of an Ostwald viscometer, an improvised apparatus using a dropping ball for examining the viscosity of liquids/solutions has been developed. The results indicate that the…

An educational experiment illustrates the electrolysis of water and copper chloride to middle school science students. The electrolysis cell is composed of filter paper soaked with Na[subscript 2]SO[subscript 4] or CuCl[subscript 2] aqueous solution sandwiched, along with a sheet of platinum foil, between two coin-type lithium batteries. When the…

Although ammeters are very important tools for science classes in elementary and junior high schools, many ordinary ones are not easy to handle nor sufficiently educational. From this viewpoint, the authors have investigated the possibility of using clamp-on ammeters, which are very common among professional electricians, for educational purposes.…

The method for extracting and separating hydrophobic photosynthetic pigments proposed by Katayama "et al." ("Japanese Journal of Phycology," 42, 71-77, 1994) has been improved to introduce it to student laboratories at the senior high school level. Silica gel powder was used for removing water from fresh materials prior to…

To cope with some social problems, Japanese educational planners are drafting some proposals for research into innovations in the educational system. This paper reports on some research recently done which looked into the relationships of the Japanese educational environment and the reasoning/thinking skills and process skills of students in…

Organized by the International Commission on Physics Education (ICPE) and the Physics Education Society of Japan, the conference reported here, the first of its kind held in Asia, was designed to inform teachers of results of prior ICPE conferences as well as to explore desirable directions for physics education, and was attended by nearly 450…