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…

Analogies are useful tools instructors can use to help make challenging concepts less abstract by drawing connections to familiar contexts. In this paper we provide an overview of the various analogies published in the education literature that are situated in the context of enzyme kinetics, including narrative-based analogies (analogies intended…

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…

In this work, we discuss the importance of underlying theoretical assumptions in research, focusing on the conclusions reached when analyzing data from a misconceptions constructivist (stable, unitary) perspective in contrast to a fine-grained constructivist (resources, knowledge-in-pieces) perspective. Both frameworks are rooted in the idea that…

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…

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…

Student understanding regarding topics in upper-division courses, such as biochemistry, is not well represented in the literature. Herein we describe a study that investigated students' reasoning about Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics and enzyme inhibition. Our qualitative study involved semistructured interviews with fourteen second-year students…

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:…

The themes discussed in this study relate to how students reason about the information encoded in rate constants, which is important for developing a deep understanding of chemical kinetics at the molecular level. This study is part of a larger project centered more generally on students' understanding and use of mathematics in chemical kinetics.…

Journal impact factors are a metric often used to evaluate journals; they are calculated by considering a journal's citation and publication rates during a specified time period. In some cases, impact factors can be misleading because they do not take into account the publication of different types of papers. In the "Journal of Chemical…

Graphical representations are an important tool used to model abstract processes in fields such as chemistry. Successful interpretation of a graph involves a combination of mathematical expertise and discipline-specific content to reason about the relationship between the variables and to describe the phenomena represented. In this work, we…