About the Conference

The Biennial Conference on Chemical Education has grown from DivCHED’s mid-century planning conference into not only its flagship meeting, but the world’s largest gathering of chemistry educators.

BCCE’s roots trace through ACS Division of Chemical Education planning meetings in the 1960s and the first Biennial Conference at Snowmass, Colorado, in 1970. The 1972 meeting at Mt. Holyoke College is later described in the record as the first open BCCE, establishing the conference as a recurring forum for the broader chemical education community. Since then, BCCE has rotated among host institutions, with each campus adding its own setting, leadership, and local character to the conference.

From the beginning, BCCE has been more than a traditional conference. Its format has combined scholarship, classroom practice, workshops, demonstrations, curriculum exchange, exhibits, plenary lectures, and informal professional networking. That mix has helped the conference serve chemstry educators from across the globe, including high school teachers, two-year college faculty, university instructors, graduate students, education researchers, curriculum designers, and informal science educators within the same shared space. The conference provides educators with opportunities for interacting with colleagues in formal and informal settings and can be an excellent source for ideas, inspiration, and materials for those both new to chemistry education and those who have years of experience.

Across five decades, BCCE has also served as a working record of the field’s priorities. Early and mid-period programs show recurring attention to laboratory instruction, classroom demonstrations, curriculum reform, teacher preparation, testing and assessment, AP chemistry, student misconceptions, environmental chemistry, diversity, and public engagement. As teaching technologies changed, BCCE became a venue for exploring computer-assisted instruction, molecular visualization, the World Wide Web, digital resources, and new approaches to laboratory instrumentation.

The conference has also reflected the growth of chemistry education research as a discipline. Sessions increasingly examine how students learn chemistry, how instructors assess learning, how curricula shape student success, and how evidence from the classroom can improve teaching practice. In this sense, BCCE has helped connect the practical craft of teaching with a more systematic study of learning.

Recent conferences show the scale and breadth of the modern BCCE community. The 25th BCCE at Notre Dame University in 2018 drew about 1,700 participants and included nearly 1,400 papers and 125 workshops, making it the largest BCCE to that point. Later meetings continued to emphasize classroom practice, curriculum and cognition, assessment, professional development, sustainability, accessibility, and community across every level of chemistry education.

The 2026 BCCE in Madison marks the 29th conference and returns to the city 50 years after UW–Madison hosted the 4th BCCE in 1976. Its theme, “Reflecting Back, Marching Forward,” captures the continuing purpose of BCCE: to preserve the memory of chemistry education while advancing how chemistry is taught, learned, and shared. The conference’s history is not only a sequence of host campuses and dates; it is a record of educators repeatedly gathering to ask what chemistry teaching should become next.