Decorative beads are tested for the presence of iron pyrite, or FeS2, in an activity well-suited for the National Chemistry Week theme of "Chemistry Rocks!"
The October 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: geochemistry in action; research on effective teaching and study approaches; keeping education and chemistry relevant; communication and writing; spectroscopy; chromatography; synthesis; teaching resources; mining the archive: chemistry rocks!
Face to face professional development provides the opportunity for teachers to learn from and share with other teachers. This post provides an example of one of the many great ideas that I have learned from other teachers.
Beyond Appearances: Students’ Misconceptions about Basic Chemical Ideas on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s website has proven a wonderfully handy document to have around. The report is the work of Dr. Vanessa Kind of Durham University (formerly of The University of London) and briefly summarizes student misconceptions and possible pedagogical remedies in eleven different content areas.
Every day, one new peer-reviewed research article from any ACS journal will be selected to be freely available and remain open access for all to read. These articles are selected based upon recommendations by editors of ACS Journals and made available as a service to the global research community.
I have been in the lab conducting tests on the chemical and physical properties of various geological samples. In my investigations I’ve found that hematite is a particular mineral that is easy to acquire and quite amenable to experimentation.
In this activity, students can look inside the model that resembles the atom and find information that reinforces what an isotope actually is. Furthermore, the quantitative data forces students to examine beliefs about different types of averages and what the numbers really mean. This takes a bit of effort to set up but is inexpensive and can be used year after year.
Whenever I’m asked where I live and what I do, I answer with “I’m a teacher overseas.” The immediate response from people is “English? Peace Corps?” I am a high school science teacher at the American School of Dubai. There is a misconception that teaching somewhere else in the world is drastically different than teaching right in your backyard, and it really isn’t.
Stephanie O'Brien took a tip from the elementary school teachers and created literacy stations to help increase the amount of reading and writing in her classroom. Literacy centers support students by arming them with the tools to utilize when examining text documents, charts, graphs, pictures etc. to take the content and make it comprehensible. She provides examples of literacy centers she uses in her classroom.
As I began to prepare my labs for this upcoming year, I decided to put a bit of a twist on a previous density of a block lab I had used in the past entitled the Measurement Challenge that is sold by Flinn Scientific. It can also be used to find the mass of a block given the materials density and requiring students to measure and calculate the blocks volume. My added twist resulted in great scientific discourse.
