Laboratory Instruction

The Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum (CLC) Innovators Program is now accepting applications for the 2026 cohort! This program offers institutional teams from across the U.S. the chance to participate in a week-long summer institute and ongoing virtual support meetings during the 2026-2027 academic year.

PART 1: Why this lab is no good For many years I was troubled by this commonly used, straight-forward, interesting-to-carry-out, and engaging experiment¹. This analytical, mole concept-based activity can be found in pretty much any chemistry lab manual, from Grade 11 to first-year university.

A popular method for demonstrating the effect of temperature on chemical equilibrium involves the use of Co²⁺ complexes.

Back when I started teaching college courses (late 2000s/early 2010s) I was pretty involved in the development of biology and chemistry content for introductory sciences courses that could be used in online, hybrid, and in-person modalities.

Bottles of soda are sealed under high pressures of CO₂, or P_CO2. This causes a substantial amount of CO₂ to dissolve into the beverage, giving the drink its fizziness. But what exactly is the pressure inside a bottle of soda?

Over the past several months, as we've all attempted to embrace Remote Learning, there is a topic that has repeatedly surfaced and clearly merits discussion: Online Chemistry Labs. From Stacey Lowery Bretz's early call to lab course justification in her J. Chem.

An article recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education by Ruth E. Nalliah¹ describes a great experiment for studying chemical kinetics that is extremely simple to set up and carry out. The experiment involves monitoring the reaction between blue food dye and hydrogen peroxide in the presence of base:

One of the presentations I gave this summer was at the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators using my vocabulary sort as a framework to talk about Modeling InstructionTM.

The June, 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education contains an article tha