Highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of research, we present a series of experiments for undergraduate lab courses that teach the principles of preparative ion exchange chromatography and flame emission spectroscopy. Through these inquiry-based experiments, the students learn about experimental design and instrument limitations, naturally…

Students in a typical instrumental analysis course may learn more than 30 analytical techniques. There are more than 150 components associated with the instrumentation that they learn. To help students organize this large amount of information, we classified these components into four categories: sources, samples, discriminators, and detectors. In…

Success in undergraduate chemical experiments requires students to develop knowledge and skills of instrumentation, equipment, and chemical techniques. In this technology report, we propose an adaptable and user-focused strategy to improve students' foundational skill and proficiency with chemical laboratory techniques and instrumentation. The…

Virtually all modern chemical instrumentation is controlled by computers. While software packages are continually becoming easier to use, allowing for more researchers to utilize more complex instruments, conveying some level of understanding as to how computers and instruments communicate is still an important part of the undergraduate…

In a typical chemistry instrumentation laboratory, students learn analytical techniques through a well-developed procedure. Such an approach, however, does not engage students in a creative endeavor. To foster the intrinsic motivation of students' desire to learn, improve their confidence in self-directed learning activities and enhance their…

For most chemistry curricula, laboratory-based activities in quantitative and instrumental analysis continue to be an important aspect of student development/training, one that can be more effective if conceptual understanding is delivered through an inquiry-based process relating the material to relevant issues of public interest and student…

The teaching of instrumental analysis for many small colleges and high schools continues to be stymied by high-cost, complicated maintenance, high power requirements, and often the sheer bulk of the instrumentation. Such issues have led us to develop inexpensive instruments as part of a SMILE initiative (small, mobile instruments for laboratory…

Because of the rapidly changing nature of chemical instrumentation, students must be trained in how to learn and understand new instruments. Toward this end, students are asked to create small instrument manuals, or instrument profiles, for the major pieces of equipment studied during an instrumental analysis course. This writing-intensive process…

The physical properties of oxygen, in particular, the blue color of the liquid phase, the red glow of its chemiluminescence, and its paramagnetism as shown by the entrapment or deflection of liquid oxygen by a magnetic field, can be investigated in a regular school setting with hand-held spectrophotometers and digital cameras. In college-level…

Access to state-of-the-art instrumentation, namely nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, early in the college curriculum was provided to undergraduate students in an effort to improve student perceptions of science. Proton NMR spectroscopy was introduced as part of an aspirin synthesis in a guided-inquiry approach to spectral…

A new lecture/laboratory course to offer advanced biochemical training for undergraduate and early graduate students has been developed in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. This unique course offers students an opportunity to work hands-on with modern instrumentation not normally found in a predominately…

The purpose of this study is to find out what students in the first chemistry course at the undergraduate level (general chemistry for science majors) know about the affordances of instrumentation used in the general chemistry laboratory and how their knowledge develops over time. Overall, students see the PASCO(TM) system as a useful and accurate…

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) has become an important optical biosensing technology in the areas of biochemistry, biology, and medical sciences because of its real-time, label-free, and noninvasive nature. The high cost of commercial devices and consumables has prevented SPR from being introduced in the undergraduate laboratory. Here, we present…

A simulation game is used to teach students in instrumental analysis courses to find the latest developments in the field, use the journal literature, and apply critical thinking to determine the relative importance of the work they find. They also learn about the business of chemical instruments and to make oral presentations. The competitive…

The fundamentals, as well as the instrumentation of the quartz-crystal microbalance (QCM) technique that is used in an undergraduate laboratory experiment are being described. The QCM response can be easily used to change the properties of any system.