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

Two groups of students, typically, have difficulty with titrations, the first time around. Those that act too rashly and overshoot the endpoint, and those over-cautious ones who take forever to finish. I have a nautical analogy that seemed to have helped my groups in my lab recently.

• Grades are not good incentive or effective feedback • Grades are not good markers of learning • Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration • Grades pit students and teachers against each other • Grades are mechanisms of institutional control • Grades aren’t fair

As a chemistry teacher considering the switch to standards-based grading, you might be wondering how lab reports work in a system that is not based on points.

The bush fires in Australia have killed an estimated 500 billion animals and caused widespread damage. Can these fires be connected to greenhouse gas emissions and human-caused climate change? What kind of warnings have scientists issued about the possibility of such fires in relation to climate change?

What are we doing to help kids achieve?

There are many things I love about teaching. I love helping students grow in their understanding of science and have “aha” moments.  I love helping students find their passion and I love it when my students make me laugh. One thing I don’t love? Grading. It piles up and takes away my time with my family.

Flipped classrooms are a popular pedagogical technique, delivering lectures before class so that students can engage in active learning and problem-solving activities during class.

The periodic table that most of us use in our classrooms was originally developed by Dmitri Mendeleev, but thousands of alternate versions of the table have been devised over time. In this lesson, students are offered a variety of alternative versions of the periodic table.

One reason so many students find chemistry difficult is the abstract nature of the concepts (Yakmaci-Guzel, 2013).

I recently developed a demonstration that I’d like to call “The Chemical Laser Show”.