Validity of educational research instruments and student assessments has appropriately become a growing interest in the chemistry education research community. Of particular concern is an attention to the consequences to students that result from the interpretation of assessment scores and whether those consequences are swayed by invalidity within…

An undergraduate laboratory experiment for the volumetric quantitative analysis of ascorbic acid and iron in dietary supplement tablets is presented. Powdered samples of the dietary supplement tablets were volumetrically titrated against electrolytically generated reagents, and the mass of dietary reagent in the tablet was determined from the…

This article describes the results of using state-of-the-art, research-quality software as a learning tool in a general chemistry secondary school classroom setting. I present three activities designed to introduce fundamental chemical concepts regarding molecular shape and atomic orbitals to students with little background in chemistry, such as…

Within the past few decades, scholars, lawmakers, and educators have increased attention to a specific type of aggressive behavior known as bullying. While bullying is like peer aggression and harassment, in that they all pertain to negative aggressive actions, there are important distinctions among these three forms of behavior. The key features…

The molar entropy of mixing yields values that depend only on the number of mixing components rather than on their chemical nature. To explain this phenomenon using the logic of chemistry, this article considers mixing of distinguishable particles, thus complementing the well-known approach developed for nondistinguishable particles, for example,…

The correlation between necessity and change is a well-proven social interaction that can result in a ripple effect that has far-reaching implications. Just as dropping a stone in still water causes ringed waves to spread out in all directions, the implementation of a new idea or even a new business in a community can send out ripples of change…

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the…

The thermodynamic criteria for spontaneity and equilibrium in multireaction systems are developed and discussed. When N reactions are occurring simultaneously, it is shown that G and A will depend upon N independent reaction coordinates, ?a (a = 1,2, ..., N), in addition to T and p for G or T and V for A. The general criteria for spontaneity and…

The purpose of this article is to describe the ways in which the artist residencies supported preservice teachers' acquisition of content knowledge and skills and influenced their confidence level with regard to integrating the arts in field experiences in early childhood classrooms. This article begins with a description of the artist…

The usefulness of the JANAF tables is demonstrated with specific equilibrium calculations. An emphasis is placed on the nature of standard chemical potential calculations. Also, the use of the JANAF tables for calculating partition functions is examined. In the partition function calculations, the importance of the zero of energy is highlighted.

Esters are volatile and pleasantly smelling compounds, commonly used as food additives. Using Ti(OBu)[subscript 4]-catalyzed acyl exchange, we demonstrate a scent transmutation experiment, in which two fragrant esters swap their acyl and alkoxy substituents and are, during the course of a reactive distillation, quantitatively converted into two…

Undergraduate students in the teaching laboratory have successfully used N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) as organocatalysts for the acetylation of primary alcohols, despite the high water sensitivity of uncomplexed ("free") NHCs. The free NHC readily reacted with chloroform, resulting in an air- and moisture-stable adduct that liberates…

We have designed an exercise suitable for a lab or project in an undergraduate physical chemistry course that creates a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to calculate the energy of the S[subscript 0] ground electronic state and the S[subscript 1] and T[subscript 1] excited states of H[subscript 2]. The spreadsheet calculations circumvent the…

Deep knowledge of the periodic table is one of the most important keys to understand the basic principles of Chemistry. Memorizing the elements of the groups and periods is one of the most commonly used strategies to learn the position of each element in the periodic table; nevertheless, it is a hard task for most students. The use of card games…

Chemists and chemistry educators have long sought meaningful ways to visualize fundamentally abstract components, such as atoms and molecules, of their trade. As technology has improved, computer-based visualization methods have infused both research and education in chemistry. Biochemistry, in particular, has become highly dependent on ways that…