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Welcome to the Chemical Education Xchange (ChemEd X)! We hope to strengthen the community of chemistry educators by providing learning resources and forums for discussion and collaboration on our interactive platform. Take a look, and join in.
With its focus on geology and chemistry, this year’s National Chemistry Week (NCW) celebration is a chance to show students that Chemistry Rocks! An upcoming free webinar will show you resources that make it easy to integrate geology and chemistry.
Erica Jacobsen shares highlights from the September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education that are of special interest to high school chemistry teachers.
The Flinn website sums up their software with these sentences, "Flinn’s Online Chemventory™ Inventory Management System(link is external) is a cloud-based lab management system that allows multiple users on multiple devices from multiple locations! Available as a 1-Year, 3-Year or 5-Year license.
Enhancing Student Success in Chemistry
The September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: student thinking and student success; computational thinking; using games to teach: developing and making tools for teaching; understanding catalysis; green chemistry; food chemistry in the laboratory; exploring edible fats and oils; NMR spectroscopy; laboratory cross-course collaboration; physical chemistry; distilling the archives: scents and smellability; announcing the search for the next Editor-in-Chief.
The first chapter of every middle and high school science textbook I have ever seen contains a section on “the scientific method.” As a result, by the time your students get to you they are probably very adept at reciting how science is done, or at least how they think it is done. A short list of easy steps is presented which always, incomprehensibly begins with forming a hypothesis (which some people insist must be an if-then statement), and then BOOM! Science has happened. This oversimplification and the dry exercises I’ve seen used to “teach” it led me to dispense with teaching the scientific method explicitly for several years. Rather, I wanted my students to gain an understanding of science by doing science, as best as we can replicate in a classroom, though inquiry labs, class discussions, and defending claims with evidence.
The research says the best way to make your school better is to encourage teachers to participate in professional learning teams that unpack the standards to determine what each student should learn and how the learning will be measured, build a useful warehouse of evidence that learning is occurring, and critically review data collected to determine useful instructional strategies versus ineffective strategies.
The Board of Publication of the ACS Division of Chemical Education announces the opening of a search for the ninth Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE). The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for all aspects of JCE publication either directly or cooperatively through the co-publication agreement with the ACS Publications Division. A video and other documents are provided to outline the job posting, responsibilities of the position, the routine workings of JChemEd and characteristics of a well-suited candidate.
