ChemEd X contributors offer their ideas and opinions on a broad spectrum of topics pertaining to chemical education.
Blogs at ChemEd X reflect the opinions of the contributors and are open to comments. Only selected contributors blog at ChemEd X. If you would like to blog regularly at ChemEd X, please use our Contribution form to request an invitation to do so from one of our editors.
I ran a multi-day poll on Twitter that was designed to be a fun way to determine the “best” element on the periodic table. I’m sharing about the poll here on ChemEdX in case others might want to try something similar in their classrooms. The poll was run tournament-style, fashioned after NCAA Basketball’s March Madness. The event was called #MarchMatterMadness. Just like basketball’s March Madness tournament, four different “regions” were set up, and each element was seeded into brackets according to atomic number.
he Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE) will be held at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana from July 29 through August 2, 2018. This is an excellent professional development opportunity for high school and college chemistry instructors.
A greener procedure that you might consider to replace the traditional "formula of a hydrate lab" that has typically used copper II sulfate.
NGSS crosscutting concepts and core ideas are intended to be used as evidence to support explanations and arguments. I have found several lists of Chemistry core ideas online, but I don’t think I would give the ones I have seen to my students because they are either too long or written with language that I don’t think is suitable for novice learners of Chemistry. I have compiled a list of the crosscutting concepts and 12 core ideas for high school Chemistry that my students could use to support the explanations and arguments I will be asking them to write.
I attended a professional development session on the NGSS earlier this week by Brett Moulding and Nicole Paulson based on the book they wrote with Rodger Bybee, A Vision and Plan for Science Teaching and Learning. The authors propose the “gathering-reasoning-communicating” (GRC) structure as a simplified way of thinking about the Science and Engineering Practices. Reasoning is the keystone of the GRC structure and the primary thing we want science students to be doing. “Gathering” provides the raw materials for reasoning and “communicating” helps us know that reasoning has taken place.
A discussion of how students solve stoichiometry problems.
Students can sometimes struggle to grasp gas behavior, as it’s much harder to visualize gases rather than readily available solutions, solids, or mixtures. Indeed, for many labs, if gas is a product, we’re often relegated to using balloons or gas columns to capture and measure the gases produced by reactions, which can be tricky or expensive. So this year, I tried something a little different when starting my intro chemistry students’ gas laws unit, and was very happy with the results – start with an inquiry approach, allowing students to discover gas laws on their own, thanks to easily producible gas phenomena in the lab.
Having had positive experience using Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI), I decided to try and adapt a specific heat lab to the ADI process.
In my class, I use the illustration of a mountain to help students push through the challenges of chemistry. Stoichiometry is the top of chemistry mountain. As we progress through the year, I say things like “the mountain is getting steep here!” or “there is not a lot of oxygen up here!” or “I will carry you up chemistry mountain if I have to!” to keep students motivated. When students finally get to the top of chemistry mountain (mid quarter 3), the air is thin, they are tired and they are ready to base jump off the mountain (see illustration from a former student below).
With a desire to increase curiosity and enthusiasm in my classroom along with ideas gleaned from Twitter, I have shifted my curriculum to a lab-first approach.