Chemistry graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play a unique but important role in undergraduate STEM education. As leaders of laboratory and discussion sections, GTAs teach fundamental experimental techniques and reinforce course content in classrooms and have more opportunities to interact with students one-on-one or in small groups. GTAs often…

"Cannabis sativa" is a species of plant with a rich, yet controversial history. Although the utility of cannabis has been documented for thousands of years; during the last century, research has led to a more advanced understanding of its mechanism of action and therapeutic potential. Accordingly, there has been an explosion of interest…

Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses: measurement uncertainty. Accordingly, when the stand-alone introductory lab course at the University of Colorado…

Even among the sciences, physics stands out as an unusually White- and male-dominated field. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) reports that only 19% of physics faculty are women, and less than 6% of physics faculty are African American or Hispanic. Particularly for female students, the transition from high school to a college major in…

As the need for online or virtual science courses grows, it is important to incorporate laboratory work into these courses. However, it is difficult to find cost-effective ways to integrate the laboratory work, especially as campuses across the world have had to quickly transition to the online learning environment in the midst of the COVID-19…

To become scientifically literate, students must learn to proficiently utilise and fluently integrate a suite of specialised and contextualised multimodal literacy practices. While the frequency of explicit reading and writing instruction in the sciences is increasing, the wider range of multimodal practices are often not adequately addressed. We…

We present an experiment designed to hone the decision-making skills of (undergraduate) chemistry students by using aqueous crossed aldol reactions. Here, we present two simple crossed aldol reactions based on inexpensive and readily available materials: The condensation of vanillin and cinnamaldehyde with acetone. The procedure uses the variation…

MEMs gyros, such as those in smartphones allow the angular velocity of pendulums to be precisely measured at large angles, and phase plots of the angular acceleration versus the angular displacement confirm that [double dot][phi] = -[omega][superscript 2][subscript o] sin[phi] even for the non-sinusoidal motion at amplitude [phi][subscript o]…

In this work, two exercises are described that are designed to teach students about the evolution and behavior of the electronic bands of graphene and bilayer graphene. These exercises involve performing extended Hückel molecular orbital theory calculations on polyacenes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In the first exercise, students…

"Escape ClassRoom "CSI 1.0"" is an educational escape room proposed as an interactive analytical chemistry exercise for the evaluation of undergraduate students at the end of the subject. This approach is a new form of live action learning activity in which the students have to solve an analytical problem, namely, "an…

Flavonoids have been studied extensively for their antioxidant properties. Specifically, the flavonoids in tea, such as catechin and epigallocatechin gallate, have been shown to have positive health effects. These compounds are also oxidizable, so the concentrations of these compounds in a given kind of tea can be determined using cyclic…

The importance of understanding factors that contribute to surface wettability is highlighted in this new organic chemistry laboratory experiment, which aims to introduce the application of organic chemistry at the interface of polymer chemistry and material science. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a hydrophobic silicon-based rubber, is polymerized…

This paper focuses on examining the effectiveness of three-dimensional (3D) computer models on student teachers' academic achievement, mental model construction, and spatial ability used in learning the "atomic models" topic in this study. The students were randomly assigned into two groups: the treatment group (TG) where 3D computer…

Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) is the most widely used herbicide on earth. A simple assay to quantify glyphosate concentrations in environmental samples was developed as part of an interdisciplinary effort linking introductory laboratory courses in chemistry, biology, and microbiology. In this 3 h laboratory experiment, students used…

Students collect magnetic susceptibility data to verify that Hund's rule correctly predicts electronic configurations. Systems examined include three commercially available lanthanide(III)-containing complexes of the form M(acac)[subscript 3](H[subscript 2]O)[subscript 2] (where M = La(III), Nd(III), and Gd(III), and acac denotes the [CH[subscript…