The pharmaceutical industry relies heavily on analytical techniques for identifying and characterizing drug compounds. In this experiment, undergraduate pharmacy students explored the applications of near-infrared spectroscopy for pharmaceutical analysis and its potential for identifying patterns and relationships among pharmaceutical samples. In…

A physical organic chemistry experiment is described for second-year college students. Students performed nucleophilic aromatic substitution (NAS) reactions on 5,10,15,20-tetrakis(2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorophenyl)porphyrin (TPPF[subscript 20]) using three different nucleophiles. Substitution occurs preferentially at the 4-position ("para")…

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most important and powerful methods in chemometrics as well as in a wealth of other areas. Running a PCA results in two main elements, the score plot and the loading plot; the score plot provides the location of the samples, and the loading plot indicates correlations among variables, the trends in…

The two major impetuses to improve STEM education are the shift to online learning and increasing active learning and engagement. Although the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid shift to online learning, this shift came at the cost of losing on-ground active learning strategies. This study provides descriptive analytical information on the…

Low cost, open-source analytical instrumentation has the potential to increase educational outcomes for students and enable large-scale citizen science projects. Many of these instruments rely on smartphones to collect the data, mainly because they can effectively leverage a dramatic price-to-performance ratio of the optical sensors. However,…

The Spring 2020 semester will be marked in our history as one of the most challenging semesters for higher education, although through the adversity, we were presented with opportunities for classroom innovation. A reflective account of the teaching insights gained from implementing a COVID-19 miniunit and utilizing remote oral examinations is…

The study reported here was conducted to investigate the perceptions of high school students on the use of educational games as a tool for teaching the periodic table of elements in a chemistry class in Spain. The 127 students who participated in this study came from six different classes in grade 10 (15-16 years old). The students' perceptions of…

Research suggests that difficulty in making connections among three levels of chemical representations--macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic--is a primary reason for student alternative conceptions of chemistry concepts, and computer modeling is promising to help students make the connections. However, no computer modeling-based assessment…