Previous work has shown a misalignment between the goals of faculty and students for laboratory coursework. Although faculty often list learning techniques and developing critical thinking skills as goals for laboratory, students tend to focus on affective goals, such as finishing lab early and obtaining good grades. The goals of faculty have been…

An understanding of buffers is important in a variety of chemistry subdisciplines, with relevant applications to the life sciences and health profession-related fields. Here, we describe the development and implementation of a lab that involves creating a buffer solution using baby wipes and deionized water. The goal of this lab was to emphasize a…

This work seeks to add to the growing body of chemistry education research that emphasizes the teaching and learning of advanced topics, focusing on students' understanding of enzyme kinetics. The data corpus relevant to this study involved 14 second-year undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory biochemistry course taught in a chemistry…

As described by the National Research Council, science practices reflect, in part, the way science is done. When researchers are developing an explanation for a phenomenon, they are using a combination of knowledge and skills reflected in the science practices. Laboratory-based chemistry courses provide the opportunity for students to move beyond…

The chemistry curriculum for undergraduate life science majors at Purdue University has been transformed to better meet the needs of this student population and prepare them for future success. The curriculum, called the 1-2-1 curriculum, includes four consecutive and integrated semesters of instruction in general chemistry, organic chemistry, and…

Problem solving is a critical feature of highly quantitative physical science topics, such as chemical kinetics. In order to solve a problem, students must cue into relevant features, ignore irrelevant features, and choose among potential problem-solving approaches. However, what is considered appropriate or productive for problem solving is…

Chemistry education research (CER) as a field is inherently interdisciplinary and has traditionally borrowed ideas, frameworks, and methodologies from other fields, such as anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, and science education more broadly. In this paper we encourage researchers to continue this tradition by utilizing the rich body of…

Reaction coordinate diagrams (RCDs) are chemical representations widely employed to visualize the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters associated with reactions. Previous research has demonstrated a host of misconceptions students adopt when interpreting the perceived information encoded in RCDs. This qualitative research study explores how…

Efforts to reform undergraduate chemistry laboratory coursework typically focus on the curricula of introductory-level courses, while upper-level courses are bypassed. This study used video-stimulated recall to interview 17 junior- and senior- level chemistry majors after they carried out an experiment as part of a laboratory course. It is assumed…

Zero-order systems provide an interesting opportunity for students to think about the underlying mechanism behind the physical phenomena being modeled. The work reported here is part of a larger study that seeks to characterize how students integrate chemistry and mathematics in the context of chemical kinetics. Thirty-six general chemistry…

Mathematics is used in the physical sciences to describe and model phenomena, resulting in a unique interface between mathematics and disciplines such as chemistry and physics. This paper focuses on themes emerging from a larger project that investigated how students understand and use mathematics in chemical kinetics, a field of study concerned…

We report the results of a phenomenographic analysis of faculty beliefs about the purposes for teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses in the undergraduate curriculum. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit a diverse group of faculty for interviews. Collectively, the participating faculty regularly teach or have taught…

We review literature on the teaching and learning of chemical kinetics at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Our aim in doing so is to summarize research literature, synthesize recommendations for future research, and suggest implications for practitioners. Two main bodies of literature emerged from the chemical kinetics education research:…

Little research exists on college students' learning goals in chemistry, let alone specifically pertaining to laboratory coursework. Because students' learning goals are linked to achievement and dependent on context, research on students' goals in the laboratory context may lead to better understanding about the efficacy of lab curricula. This…

Forty chemistry faculty from American Chemical Society-approved departments were interviewed to determine their goals for undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Faculty were stratified by type of institution, departmental success with regard to National Science Foundation funding for laboratory reform, and level of laboratory course. Interview…