Graduate students focus the majority of their time honing their research skills and knowledge in a very narrow area of expertise. They are sent off to postdoctoral positions where they continue to grow as scholars and scientific investigators. In most graduate programs, there is very little opportunity to train graduate students to become lecture…

This paper describes a method for determination of trihalomethanes (THMs) in drinking water via solid-phase microextraction (SPME) GC/MS as a means to develop and improve student understanding of the use of GC/MS for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the classroom, students are introduced to SPME, GC/MS instrumentation, and the use of MS…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an at-home laboratory program was created and implemented for a section of the general chemistry course at the University of Southern California. The experiments were designed to only utilize safe household items and no special equipment. These laboratory activities, spanning over 4 weeks, focused on concepts usually…

This paper presents a case study that investigated students' perceptions on the integration of a socio-scientific issue into a general chemistry course at a public university located in northwestern California. The teaching intervention is based on a digital learning environment structured by the software Prezi that students used to explore the…

Presented is a project-based learning (PBL) laboratory approach for an upper-division environmental chemistry or quantitative analysis course. In this work, a combined laboratory class of 11 environmental chemistry students developed a method based on published EPA methods for the extraction of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its…

A green organic-inorganic laboratory experiment has been developed in which students prepare a self-assembling iron cage in D[subscript 2]O at room temperature. The tetrahedral cage captures a small, neutral molecule such as cyclohexane or tetrahydrofuran. [Superscript 1]H NMR analysis distinguishes captured and free guests through diagnostic…

Open educational resources (OERs) provide a potential alternative to costly textbooks and can allow content to be edited and adapted to a variety of classroom environments. At the University of California, Davis, the OER "ChemWiki" project, as part of the greater STEMWiki Hyperlibrary, was developed to supplant traditional post-secondary…

In this laboratory experiment, students take environmental samples at various locations around the college campuses, take geospatial coordinates with a global position systems (GPS) unit, and map their results on a geo-referenced campus map with geographical information systems (GIS) software. Nitrogen dioxide air pollution sampling is used as an…