What would be a useful infrastructure to help modernize undergraduate labs and perhaps give students more experience/skills- especially those serving student populations with low socio-economic status? This blog offers a practical solution.
As high school teachers, we know that understanding how measurement works is crucial for lab skills and for understanding significant figures. We think measurement should be an easy topic for students to learn; especially because we know that teachers begin working with students in elementary school to teach these skills. However, I, and many other teachers, have spent countless hours teaching and reteaching a seemingly simple skill.
The September 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: reticular chemistry; laboratory research experience for students; historical perspective; chemistry and the environment; laboratories using color to understand chemistry; electrochemistry laboratories; DIY instrumentation; organic semiconductors; orbitals; computer-based learning and computational chemistry; from the archives: paper chromatography.
Is your school district providing OSHA required safety training to teachers and other staff that will be in the science labs in your building?
Erica Jacobsen shares highlights from the October 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education that are of special interest to high school chemistry teachers.
Back to school time means back to lab time too. Students new to chemistry have a lot on their plates the first few labs—learning unfamiliar safety procedures, becoming accustomed to writing lab reports, even figuring out which glassware they’re looking for in their lab space. How can teachers help them to navigate this newness? Two articles in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education are useful resources for “back to lab” time.
Learn a simple and very inexpensive way to build and use an "absorption spectrometer" using a smartphone. This is a great way to implement Beer's Law experiments in your classroom!
Think it’s possible to get nostalgic over paperwork? I just did, spurred by editor-in-chief Norb Pienta’s editorial Thinking about Champions in the December 2015 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education.
