Over the years a great deal of time and attention has been devoted to reform of teaching and learning in chemistry. However, many of these efforts have focused on individual faculty's experiences and intuition, rather than our understanding of how people learn or evidence about the effects of such reforms. For example, while it is widely known that students emerge from our courses with non-scientific ideas about core concepts, the reasons why this happens are often ascribed to the students' lack of ability or work ethic. However, there is emerging evidence that both the traditional pedagogical approach and the structure of the curriculum contribute to this problem. Students must be provided both with a strong foundation on which to build and link new knowledge, and an understanding of what that knowledge will be used for. In order to achieve this we need to rely on the research base and evidence emerging from discipline-based education research (DBER)-a field that combines deep disciplinary expertise with knowledge and understanding of the science of teaching and learning. This paper presents a short overview of these ideas.