At the recent ACS National Meeting in Boston I attended a symposium on global climate change. The first speaker challenged educators to provide better background for students to understand the science of the atmosphere and climate. In a democracy, that seems absolutely essential, but how many of us are really including these things in what […]

John Moore’s June 14, 2010, post to this blog described recent changes to the Journal of Chemical Education. The decision was made to discontinue posting items to this blog that were published in JCE, such as the monthly Especially for High School Teachers column, which had previously formed a large part of the content on […]

A report published in Nature last Thursday, August 4, describes the success of the computer game Foldit, which is designed to encourage people to contribute to research on protein folding and at the same time have fun. (The Nature article is restricted to those with subscriptions, but a layman’s description is here.) The success of […]

A recently reported psychological research study by scientists at Indiana University shows that if we think our students cannot do something because they are female or because they belong to a minority group, that alone is enough to reduce their learning significantly. It has been known for some time that negative stereotypes affect adversely performance […]