The limited capabilities of teaching laboratories, combined with an increasing number of students enrolled in university, require constant augmentation of instructional approaches. By enhancing laboratory demonstrations with digital technology, these structural issues can be addressed while at the same time enhancing student understanding and…

Background: The coronavirus pandemic has caused a shift in how many teaching, learning and research activities are conducted internationally. Lockdowns compelled all education sectors, including higher education (HE), to adopt a variety of online learning practices at short notice. As these changes in practice have implications beyond the…

Professional development (PD) is crucial for teachers to learn about new practices, technology, and improve self-efficacy to apply these skills. This sequential explanatory mixed-method study served to explore teachers' experiences with PD and using virtual labs in the classroom. First, in the quantitative phase of the study, a survey was…

Background: Research on chemistry education has found that students have commonly some difficulties in understanding chemical changes. These difficulties in the learning process have negatively affected students' success. For this reason, it is very important to overcome students' learning difficulties with new materials that prevent the…

Level 3 characteristics are increasingly important for fingerprint identification, particularly when the fingerprints are problematic and lack level 2 details. In practice, no reliable visualization methods for level 3 features are transferred into a course for the general public, forensic students, or investigators. Our group has reported the…

We add to a growing literature suggesting that demographic grade gaps should be attributed to biases embedded in the courses themselves. Changes in the structure of two different introductory physics classes were made while leaving the topics covered and the level of coverage unchanged. First, a class where conceptual issues were studied before…

The COVID pandemic forced teachers to be imaginative, especially with purely practical subjects such as laboratory chemistry. In the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the first-semester chemistry laboratory of the Biology course was taught with a chemistry set to be used at home. The use of the kit was evaluated from the perspective of…

Computational chemistry instructional activities are often based around students running chemical simulations via a graphical user interface (GUI). GUI-based activities offer many advantages, as they enable students to run chemical simulations with a few mouse clicks. Although these activities are excellent for introducing students to the…

In 1996, the Chemistry Department at Norwich University converted its two-semester General Chemistry course from a traditional lecture to a Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) classroom. The change to POGIL teaching in Norwich General Chemistry classes was brought about by a steady decline in student performance, as demonstrated by…

Student achievement disparities in inclusive science classrooms are concerning, as knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is increasingly important for upward mobility. When students identify with multiple marginalized sociocultural groups, progress becomes more troubling, as the interplay among these factors is…

Student achievement disparities in inclusive science classrooms are concerning, as knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is increasingly important for upward mobility. When students identify with multiple marginalized sociocultural groups, progress becomes more troubling, as the interplay among these factors is…

Many science departments encourage students to gain experience conducting research. However, finding ecological research projects that allow students to test a hypothesis in the field, over the relatively short time span of a semester, can be challenging. This article describes an inquiry-based research activity examining the influence that urban…

As teaching laboratories stand empty in light of COVID-19, we extended the practical experience from the laboratory to the safety of the students' homes. We developed a simple, robust, and versatile at-home experiment that teaches solution preparation, calibration curves, real-life sample preparation, and data analysis to second-year analytical…

The identification of coloring substances is a relevant task in the field of conservation and restoration, but it can be challenging as in real samples the target analytes are inserted in a very complex matrix made of binders and additives. Understanding this concept is fundamental for upper-division undergraduate students interested in…

Student feedback from an undergraduate biochemistry lab course suggested the use of visibly traceable proteins may assist learning. Based on this feedback, we used guided inquiry lab exercises where students developed and characterized a suite of fluorescent protein-dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) fusions as tools for a biochemistry teaching lab.…