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

Grades should provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers as to the progress students are making toward learning targets. Meaningful grades require good assessment practices. Erica Posthuma presented a ChemEd X Talk on May 11th, 2021, providing an overview of effective assessment design.

I have always been fascinated by chemical reactions that form shiny, metallic mirrors.

​Good day, gentle readers: I’ll be honest. In spite of the Pollyanna-ish pronouncements of education gurus—and the shareholders of Zoom—online Chemistry teaching is far less than ideal. I get it: we’re doing our best inside a set of rules that none of us asked for. What can we do? A lot.

To help introduce students to organic nomenclature in a way that clearly summarizes the patterns that exist in the IUPAC system, a series of paper tools were developed. The paper tool in this activity can be used to introduce the IUPAC naming of major classes of organic compounds.

In order to teach chemistry effectively, we must ascertain what our students are thinking about chemistry and make a decision regarding what to do with what we learn. Formative assessment questions provide a useful lens into students' minds regarding what they are thinking about chemistry. Let us consider then, how categorizing forma

I have been working with the Alchemie team -- founded by a former chemistry teacher, Julia Winter -- for a number of years. Trying out their learning tools for chemistry, giving feedback, and generally brainstorming new ideas for chemistry instruction. 

POGIL activities can be used to engage students in chemistry lessons through the use of student teams, effective models, and tiered questioning. Kristen Drury and Stephanie O'Brien presented in a ChemEd X Talk on April 21, 2021 and provided teachers with guidance on fostering student buy-in, student role formation, and POGIL implementation.

Traditional approaches to chemistry education generally focus on communicating conceptual knowledge, problem-solving, and understanding abstract concepts. These concentrations are crucial aspects of chemistry learning, but they tend to leave topics disconnected from meaningful applications.

Introduction: Evaluations are part of our everyday lives. And yet, so few know and implement program and project evaluations in a logical and meaningful way. This four-part blog series aims to expand our collective understanding on the definitions, kinds, and implementations of evaluation and evaluation research.

I am a 7th grade teacher who has been teaching a semester of physics and a semester of chemistry at the Harker School in San Jose, CA for the last twenty years. Early on in my career, I made a few observations based on the reactions of my students when I introduced the periodic table of elements to them. 

“What are we doing to help kids achieve?”