Cooperative Learning is a teaching pedagogy that is great to use, but often challenging to implement. In a high school general chemistry classroom (non-honors level), the range of math abilities across the student population often means that some students catch on quickly to the algebra-based concepts. Other students struggle with very basic algebra. The beauty of using Cooperative Learning is that the science teacher can use the higher ability students as another resource for the students that need to have concepts reinforced.

Human beings' color vision allows us to distinguish both large and subtle differences between objects of similar color. Consider a forest, with its multitude of greens. But objects with similar colors are not necessarily the same, as the jade and seaweed found on some Pacific coast beaches illustrate. Researchers, chemists, criminalists, and many other investigators study and compare objects and learn about their compositions by breaking the light down into its composite colors, a technique called spectroscopy