Sound research and effective teaching are both essential to the progress of science. This thesis encompasses two studies to address the two needs: a multi-scale soil study designed to validate a novel soil biological characterization method; and a pilot pedagogical study designed to test the efficacy of authentic science inquiry into gas chromatography. The soil study relies on a comparison of six soils taken from the Bahamas and Michigan. The novel method, using soil-derived VOCs analyzed via gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), proved effective for resolving soils, as hypothesized, and may prove useful for analyzing soil biology rapidly and non-destructively in future studies. The pilot pedagogical study compares traditional recipe-style instruction with authentic science inquiry in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory class. Pre- and post-assessments of students’ conceptual understanding, retention of terms, and attitude revealed the hypothesized superior efficacy of authentic science inquiry over traditional recipe-style instruction.