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To support teaching and learning in the advanced placement (AP) chemistry laboratory, the College Board published a laboratory manual, "AP Chemistry Guided-Inquiry Experiments: Applying the Science Practices," in 2013 as part of the redesigned course. This article provides a discussion of the rationale for the existence of the manual as well as its form, content, and pedagogical orientation; a summary of the manual's content and structure; guidelines for how to use the manual in teaching AP chemistry; an overview of the laboratory manual development process; a review of and response to the most common criticisms directed at the manual; and finally a brief preview of future plans to enhance the manual and support its implementation. This contribution is part of a special issue on teaching introductory chemistry in the context of the advanced placement chemistry course redesign.

Many institutions are responding to current research about how students learn science by transforming their general chemistry laboratory curricula to be inquiry-oriented. We present a comparison study of student performance after completing either a traditional or an inquiry stoichiometry experiment. This single laboratory experience was the only difference between two comparison groups enrolled in the same general chemistry course with otherwise traditional labs. Measures used to assess student performance included an open-response question, and ACS multiple-choice test items at various points in the course, as well as observations of students in the laboratory, and interviews. Statistical analysis of data used an ANOVA model, including a covariate to control for students' prior knowledge and skills. Students who completed the inquiry experiment significantly outperformed students who did the traditional experiment on stoichiometry content problems and experimental design tasks. No difference in performance between the groups was found on problems not directly related to the content of the experiment. These results provide evidence that student learning of chemistry content and skills is enhanced by a single inquiry laboratory experience, and suggest that increasing the number and variety of inquiry experiments may lead to greater improvements in performance. This study is part of a larger study examining the impact on student performance of incrementally shifting toward more inquiry experiments in the laboratory portion of general chemistry. (Contains 5 tables, 1 figure, and 3 textboxes.)

We present a novel first-year chemistry laboratory experiment that connects solubility, equilibrium, and chemical periodicity concepts. It employs a unique format that asks students to replicate experiments described in different sample lab reports, each lacking some essential information, rather than follow a scripted procedure. This structure is designed, based on research findings on the science of learning, to promote development of students' experimental design and data analysis skills as well as their understanding of the importance and essential qualities of written and verbal communication between scientists. The experiment begins with titration of saturated solutions of magnesium, calcium, and strontium hydroxides followed by the calculation of the solubility product of each compound. Students use their results to determine a periodic trend in the solubility of the group 2 compounds they titrated, apply the trend to predict the solubility of other, toxic group 2 hydroxides, and examine the value of the experiment within the context of a green chemistry philosophy.

We present an alternative to a traditional first-year chemistry laboratory experiment. This experiment has four key features: students utilize stoichiometry, learn and apply principles of green chemistry, engage in authentic scientific inquiry, and discover why each part of a scientific lab report is necessary. The importance and essential qualities of written and verbal communication between scientists are discovered by students as they experiment by attempting to replicate different sample lab reports, each lacking some essential information. Experimenting in this way meets several general chemistry goals simultaneously: completion of an experiment on mass-mole relationships in a chemical reaction, demonstration of green chemistry ideas in action, and, most importantly, instruction on how and why scientists communicate in a standard written format. In fact, students invent these standards themselves as they discover this critical process skill through inquiry.

A novel experiment connecting equilibrium, solubility and periodicity concepts is presented. The experiment promotes development of students' experimental design and data analysis skills and introduces them to green chemistry principles.

A study was conducted to examine incremental change in the general chemistry laboratory. Previous studies show that wholesale change in general chemistry laboratory curricula from traditional student experiments to discovery-based student experiments has a significant and positive impact on student learning. Qualitative findings are also discussed.