Latest articles, blogs, and events from the chemical education community

As 2025 comes to a close, I am stepping down from my role as Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Education Xchange (ChemEd X). It has been a privilege to serve this community, and the experience has been both professionally meaningful and personally rewarding. IMHO, chemistry is the most difficult subject to teach.

At our November meeting, Easing your way into CED Unit 4: Low prep, high engagement activities,  we focused on low-prep, high-engagement strategies for AP Chemistry Unit 4 (Chemical Reactions), with an emphasis on helping students build conceptual understanding while preparing for AP-level rigor.

I teach an introductory college chemistry course for non-science majors called Chemistry of Everyday Things. Most of my students have little prior science experience, and they often begin the course intimidated by chemistry.

Anything with liquid nitrogen tends to be

Implementing a Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) style recrystallization activity provides students with an opportunity to actively engage in the learning process while reinforcing key chemical concepts such as polarity, solubility, and purification techniques.

The conversion of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into adenosine diphosphate (ADP) is an extremely important energy source for living organisms. Under common physiological conditions, it can be expressed as:

Coulomb’s Law is used to explain several properties in the AP Chemistry CED, and we spent our September meeting examining the different situations where Coulomb’s Law is applicable and sharing strategies for helping students craft appropriate responses.

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.

In this one-day, remotely delivered, immersive, and interactive mini-institute, participants will learn how to use the VisChem Approach.

In 2015, I began making chemistry videos to reduce the amount of in-class lecturing during exam review. Some students needed a detailed reteach of specific content, others only needed a refresher, and still others grew frustrated when I retaught concepts they already understood well. Creating videos provided the flexibility to meet all of these needs.