Resonance is a crucial concept in Organic Chemistry that enables both deriving chemical properties from molecular structures and predicting reactions by considering electron density distribution. Despite its importance for problem-solving and learning success, learners encounter various difficulties with this concept. Although prior research…

The need for geoscience students to develop a quantitative skillset is ever increasing. However, this can be difficult to implement in university-style lecture courses in a way that is both manageable for the instructor and does not involve lengthy, potentially repetitive, question sheets for the students. Here, a method for teaching dimensional…

A concept for undergraduate mechanics courses at universities is introduced where traditional pencil-paper based exercises are partially replaced by experimental exercises, in which smartphones are used as measurement devices. A detailed guidance for practical realization and implementation of these tasks formats into the course is presented.…

Preparatory or bridging courses are widespread and have a long tradition at universities. They are designed to increase students' academic success -- in particular of students with low prior knowledge -- and to reduce dropout rates. However, critics of these short and compact bridging courses complain that preparatory courses are not able to fill…

Critical thinking is one of the most important sets of cognitive abilities and dispositions required for both scientists and global citizens. In this explorative study, we examine which critical thinking aspects are perceived as relevant by biology graduate students and in what ways they found these aspects important for their scientific work.…

This article is about the development of an Internet-based remotely-controlled physical experiment, this is a part of the Remotely Controlled Laboratory at the University of Applied Sciences of Cologne known as TH Köln. The main experimental set-up is based on Pohl's Torsion Pendulum which was enhanced by a PXI measurement system and a webcam. In…

The need to develop clean-energy storage systems, harvesting technologies, and new functional materials are but a few of the many contemporary challenges in the domain of science today. To address these challenges, problem solving has become a key skill of the 21st century. It is generally documented, however, that experts and students differ in…

Although fundamental chemistry acts as a prerequisite for fully comprehending imperative aspects of biology, Bielefeld University is one of three universities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany that does not require majors or minors in biology education to complete classes in general chemistry, before fulfilling graduation requirements. A study…

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the education system worldwide, which was forced to respond with a sudden shift to distance learning. While successful distance teaching requires careful thinking, planning, and the development of technological and human resources, there was no time for preparation in the current situation. Various…

The Participatory Action Research (PAR) model developed by Eilks and Ralle is very well known in science education. Over the years, many teaching and learning materials have been developed and implemented in German secondary schools using this method. The success of the model encouraged us to adapt it to the university level in order to develop…

The "Hagen Cumulative Science Project" is a large-scale replication project based on students' thesis work. In the project, we aim to (a) teach students to conduct the entire research process for conducting a replication according to open science standards and (b) contribute to cumulative science by increasing the number of direct…

The course design "Training OC" for training the application of basic concepts consists of four topics: formula language, structure-property relations, reaction mechanisms, and complex tasks that the students should solve with the conceptual knowledge they acquired in the first three topics. A main goal of the course was to enable the…

Research in science education agrees that one of the key challenges of learners in the discipline is certainly connecting domain-specific representations to the underlying concepts. One way of supporting students to make applicable connections is using purposefully designed highlighting techniques in multimedia instructions. In order to examine…

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information.…

A simple, reliable, and cost-effective experiment is presented in which students synthesized citrate-capped gold nanoparticles (GNPs), functionalized them with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), and transferred the PEG-GNPs from water to the organic phase dichloromethane. The experiment introduces students to nanotechnology with foci on important…