Laboratory work in chemistry has been extensively researched in the last decade but the gap between research and practice is still broad. This "Perspective" shares 10 guiding principles relating to university laboratory education, drawing on research over the last decade. Written with an audience of practitioners in mind, the…

Chemistry education research has increasingly considered the role of affect when investigating chemistry learning environments over the past decade. Despite its popularity in educational spheres, mindset has been understudied from a chemistry-specific perspective. Mindset encompasses one's beliefs about the ability to change intelligence with…

Building reasonable scientific arguments is a fundamental skill students need to participate in scientific discussions. In organic chemistry, students' argumentation and reasoning skills on reaction mechanisms are described as indicators of success. However, students often experience challenges with how to structure their arguments, use scientific…

The goal of graduate education has consistently been to produce independent scientists who can advance the knowledge of their fields, which has led to a series of staple elements in graduate components (i.e. research, courses, seminars, etc.) However, criticisms of graduate education in chemistry have been raised, stating that the current…

Organic Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything (OCLUE) is an undergraduate lecture-based organic chemistry course that has been transformed in line with the vision for science education set out by the 'Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas' (National Research Council, 2012). OCLUE is designed…

Science educators recognize the need to teach scientific ways of knowing and reasoning in addition to scientific knowledge. However, characterizing and assessing scientific ways of knowing and reasoning is challenging. Writing-to-learn offers one way of eliciting and supporting students' reasoning; further, writing serves to externalize and make…

The design of assessment tools is critical to accurately evaluate students' understanding of chemistry. Although extensive research has been conducted on various aspects of assessment tool design, few studies in chemistry have focused on the impact of the order in which questions are presented to students on the measurement of students'…

Fundamentally concerned with motivation, self-determination theory (SDT) represents a framework of several mini-theories to explore how social context interacts with people's motivational types categorized by degree of regulation internalization. This paper aims to modify an existing theory-based instrument (Academic Motivation Scale, or AMS) and…

We report the results of a phenomenographic analysis of faculty beliefs about the purposes for teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses in the undergraduate curriculum. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit a diverse group of faculty for interviews. Collectively, the participating faculty regularly teach or have taught…

Identifying students' misconceptions and learning difficulties and finding effective ways of addressing them has been one of the major concerns in chemistry education. However, the chemistry education community has paid little attention to determining discipline-specific aspects of chemistry that can lead to learning difficulties and…

Dominant educational approaches in chemistry focus on the learning of somewhat isolated concepts and ideas about chemical substances and reactions. Reform efforts often seek to engage students in the generation of knowledge through the investigation of chemical phenomena, with emphasis on the development and application of models to build causal…

Few studies have focused specifically on the role that language plays in learning chemistry. We report here an investigation into the ability of language comprehension measures to predict performance in university introductory chemistry courses. This work is informed by theories of language comprehension, which posit that high-skilled…

The purpose of the study was to explore students' conceptual frameworks of models of atomic structure and periodic variations, chemical bonding, and molecular shape and polarity, and how these conceptual frameworks influence their quality of explanations and ability to shift among chemical representations. This study employed a purposeful sampling…

This paper reports on students' understanding of sugar concentration in aqueous solutions presented in two different modes: a visual submicroscopic mode for particles and a verbal mode referring to macroscopic amounts of sugar. One hundred and forty-five tertiary college students studying some form of first-year chemistry participated in the…

In the 1998-99 academic year, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba reorganized its first-year course to include two types of sections: "regular sections" for students with high school chemistry grades above 70%, and "developmental sections" for students with grades between 50 and 70%. The regular sections…