Purpose: This article presented the results of studies that examined the appropriateness of the content, readability of printed learning materials and the effectiveness of external resources in ecology course offered at Universitas Terbuka. To integrate external resources, links to their websites were provided in the printed materials.…

Undergraduate research initiatives such as mentoring programs, conferences, and journals typically focus on the later stages of undergraduate studies. It is not unusual for a student to reach the final year of their program without developing their awareness of research within their discipline or their institution. SUREbyts is a project that…

There has been a growing emphasis on integrating green and sustainable chemistry (GSC) into the curriculum. Unfortunately, there is yet to be a nationwide, uniform decision of which aspects should be included or how, leaving individual instructors or institutions to decide whether--and how--to address GSC knowledge. Furthermore, faculty nationwide…

Concept mapping (CM) can be an effective strategy to facilitate understanding-based learning of complex and abstract scientific content. In our study, we tried to answer two questions that have not yet been clarified: (1) How effective is CM if the learners do not have the textual learning material available when constructing their concept maps…

This research shows that improved scientific reasoning and application of concepts occurred when creating and viewing student-crafted digital storytelling projects. By utilizing digital storytelling projects to showcase course competencies in an undergraduate biology course, students were able to apply subject matter outside the classroom. In this…

Instrumentation plays a critical, ubiquitous role in modern chemistry. The undergraduate chemistry curriculum must therefore cultivate students' ability to investigate chemical phenomena via relevant instruments. The instructional laboratory serves as the primary context in which undergraduates learn about instrumentation, where use of instruments…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When disseminating curricula, typically only the physical curriculum materials are transferred from the instructor to another. However, left as artifacts in the curricula are a set of epistemological beliefs held by the creators and designers of the…

A didactic student workbook has been used to teach human anatomy and physiology. The didactic workbook has significantly reduced the disparity between teaching materials and students. It accommodated all student learning styles, integrated with "asma al-husna" (the best names are based on the characteristics of God). This workbook also…

This work provides information about the design, implementation, and assessment of the instructional role of a bilingual (English and Portuguese) web-based board game designed to assist Brazilian Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students in reviewing the content related to thermodynamics, chemical equilibrium, and chemical kinetics. The game…

The ground-breaking image of a black hole's event horizon, which captured the public's attention and imagination in April 2019, was captured using the power of interferometry: many separate telescopes working together to observe the cosmos in incredible detail. Many recent astrophysical discoveries that have revolutionized the scientific…

A modular and target-group oriented online video library with 48 videos was developed and produced in order to reduce the complexity of an introductory organic chemistry laboratory class. The library comprises three different types of videos: "Tutorials" explaining fundamental laboratory techniques, "Do nots" pointing students…

Scientific reasoning, argumentation, and problem-solving are essential skills in 21st century. They help people solve problems in daily life. This study aimed to investigate the effect of local-based teaching materials on student's argumentation, scientific reasoning, and problemsolving skills using Science Project-based Learning (SPjBL).…

Overall, the major chemical information retrieval products Reaxys and SciFinder have several similarities such as numbers of document records, numbers of characterized substances (counting the PubChem Compounds integrated in Reaxys), and, possibly, numbers of different chemical reactions. Reaxys has well over 100 times the number of experimental…

Powder diffraction is one of the most widely used analytical techniques for characterizing solid state materials. It can be used for phase or polymorph identification, quantitative analysis, cell parameter determination, or even full crystal structure analysis using the powerful Rietveld refinement method. As with much of modern crystallography,…

Dropout and low academic performance at university level constitute a big current challenge. In this work, materials comprising different interactive tools were developed following instructional design, rooted in the cognitive load theory. They were applied in a first-year lecture chemistry course to tackle low academic performance and high…