Teaching cosmology at the undergraduate or high school level requires simplifications and analogies, and inevitably brings the teacher into contact with at least one of the pedagogical interpretations of the expanding Universe. The by far most popular interpretation holds that galaxies in an expanding Universe are stationary, while space itself…

Despite their increasingly widespread adoption in post-secondary education, scholars and practitioners know very little about the impact of digital data displays on instructors' sense-making and academic planning. In this manuscript, I report the results of comparative case studies of five different introductory physics instructors at three…

UC Merced's upper-division analytical chemistry course has been modified to include a series of Jupyter notebooks intended to introduce chemistry students to the Python computer language. These Jupyter notebooks were designed to cover a wide variety of topics common to quantitative and instrumental analysis. Assuming no prior programming…

The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced chemistry teaching from traditional classrooms to online courses worldwide. Herein, we will share some experiences of our online teaching of inorganic chemistry. First, we investigated various teaching platforms and adjusted the online teaching approaches for helping students to be…

Experiments written for students who were quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic are described. These were developed to provide hands-on lab experiences that students would not get due to the online nature of course offerings during the crisis. The laboratories described include an extraction and oxidation of aldehydes from food items, a study…

This report describes rapid changes to instructional materials, assessment, and technology use in a flipped college-level organic chemistry course in response to the sudden COVID-19 campus closures and midsemester transition to remote learning. The instructors modified in-class instructional materials to accommodate students' preference for…

During the transition from an in-person Organic Chemistry II class to a remote learning version of the class midsemester, a small-group problem-solving session exercise was replaced with embedded video questions as a low-stakes assignment with direct instructor feedback. Whereas the in-person small-group problem-solving session was a group…

In a normal year approximately 3 months pass between students taking their final examinations in high school or college and beginning an undergraduate course in chemistry. In the months prior to those examinations, students will usually have undertaken an extensive period of revision and consolidation of the key concepts learned throughout their…

Undergraduate organic chemistry courses have a reputation for being difficult among students in biological and physical sciences programs. Due to the extensive problem-solving, visualization, and depiction of chemical structures/reactions required, students may perceive learning such content as similar to learning a new language. Several…

Teaching emulsion polymerization is an important benchmark in undergraduate polymer courses. However, the introduction of hands-on experiments in undergraduate polymer laboratories is challenging: experimental time, reagents, and equipment involved are the primary restraints. We report a practical emulsion polymerization laboratory experiment for…

We present here an extension of Morrison's and Ruder's "Sequence-Response Questions" (SRQs) that allows for more nuance in the assessment of student responses to these questions. We have implemented grading software (which we call ANGST, "Automated Nuanced Grading & Statistics Tool") in a Microsoft Excel sheet that can take…

A multifaceted experiment, accessible to students either in an introductory organic chemistry course or in a more advanced laboratory setting, is described for investigating the addition of dichlorocarbene to E- and Z-[beta]-methylstyrenes. The innovative exercise, which integrates elements of synthesis, mechanisms, instrumental analysis,…

The stated purpose of this paper is to provide a simple and quick method to assemble pH electrodes using readily available materials. The present assembled electrodes are comparable with commercial pH electrodes, with accuracy for pH determination in the range 2-12. Furthermore, the constructed simple pH electrodes exhibit a fast and stable…

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a powerful tool for gene editing and it has become increasingly important for biology students to understand this emerging technique. Most CRISPR laboratory teaching modules use complex metazoan systems or mammalian cell culture which can be expensive. Here, we present a lab module that engages students in learning the…

The Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction, which is one of the most important methods for C-C bond formation in modern organic synthesis, exhibits broad functional group compatibility. A Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling protocol is reported that is suitable for demonstrating this compatibility in undergraduate laboratories. In this reaction, two…