Introduction: Research and practice in chemical education in advanced courses

Bodner, George M.; Weaver, Gabriela C.

doi:10.1039/b806596a

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As a result, the participants all reported that they began by trying to memorize their way through the course. Their approach to the course on organic synthesis was therefore similar to the approach that undergraduates, taking organic chemistry for the first time, often take (Bodner & Weaver, ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culturing reality: How organic chemistry graduate students develop into practitioners

Bhattacharyya

Bodner

2014

J Res Sci Teach

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although one of the presumed aims of graduate training programs is to help students develop into practitioners of their chosen fields, very little is known about how this transition occurs. In the course of studying how graduate students learn to solve organic synthesis problems, we were able to identify some of the key factors in the epistemic development from student to practitioner. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four first-year organic chemistry graduate students enrolled in a course on organic synthesis and two third-year organic chemistry graduate students who were in the process of preparing an original research proposal in organic synthesis as a component of their Ph.D. oral qualifying exams. Three interconnected factors that fostered the students' development into practicing organic chemists were identified: (1) the students needed to perceive the material they were asked to learn in the course lectures and in other interactions with the professor as "real;" (2) they needed to work on authentic activities that provided concrete instruments for knowledge construction; and (3) the students needed scaffolding with a moreknowledgeable other in the form of feedback on the authentic activity. #

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culturing reality: How organic chemistry graduate students develop into practitioners

Bhattacharyya

Bodner

2014

J Res Sci Teach

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research in science education in general, and in chemistry education in particular, at the college level over the past 30 years has been mostly focused on teaching and learning issues in introductory courses for science and engineering majors. Fewer studies have explored the nature and development of scientific knowledge and skills in advanced courses (Bodner & Weaver, 2008). This is problematic because our current understanding of how core concepts and ideas change or develop in a given discipline is mostly confined to those stages in which intuitive or naïve ways of conceptualizing the world are beginning to coexist with or be replaced by basic science constructs (Abell & Lederman, 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

College chemistry students' mental models of acids and acid strength

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The central goal of this study was to characterize the mental models of acids and acid strength expressed by advanced college chemistry students when engaged in prediction, explanation, and justification tasks that asked them to rank chemical compounds based on their relative acid strength. For that purpose we completed a qualitative research study involving students enrolled in different types of organic chemistry course sections at our university. Our analysis led to the identification of four distinct mental models, some of which resembled scientific models of acids and acid strength. However, the distinct models are better characterized as synthetic models that combined assumptions from one or more scientific models with intuitive beliefs about factors that determine the properties of chemical substances. For many students in our sample, mental models served more as tools for heuristic decision-making based on intuitively appealing, but many times mistaken, concept associations rather than as cognitive tools to generate explanations. Although many research participants used a single general mental model to complete all of the interview tasks, the presence of specific problem features or changes in the nature of the task (e.g., prediction vs. explanation) prompted several students to change their mental model or to add a different mental representation. Our study indicates that properly diversifying and sequencing the types of academic tasks in which students are asked to participate could better foster meaningful learning as different types of cognitive resources may be activated by different students, and thus shared, analyzed, and discussed. ß

show abstract

“…Relevant for the work discussed in this paper is the recent movement toward more chemistry education research carried out in upper-division contexts on advanced topics. However, most work has still been contextualized in general chemistry courses, suggesting the need for more research that provides insight regarding how to enhance and improve the teaching and learning of advanced topics in the chemistry curriculum (23,24). In particular, chemical kinetics and enzyme kinetics have been identified as understudied topics in the growing body of education literature (1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research on Students' Understanding of Michaelis-Menten Kinetics and Enzyme Inhibition: Implications for Instruction and Learning

Rodriguez

Towns

2020

The Biophysicist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ABSTRACT We report a summary of the results from an education research project that investigated student reasoning related to Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics and enzyme inhibition. We have previously discussed students' mathematical reasoning related to rate laws and reaction order, student conceptions of different types of enzyme inhibition (competitive, noncompetitive, and uncompetitive), and student understanding of representations used to describe enzyme kinetics (Michaelis-Menten graphs, Lineweaver-Burk plots, reaction schemes). In this paper, we bring together the different publications that resulted from this project to emphasize the implications for instruction gleaned from each study and discuss the additional insight provided by synthesizing the results across studies. For this work, the results from this project have been framed according to the refined consensus model of pedagogical content knowledge, a framework from science education that defines the knowledge and skills needed to transform content knowledge into teaching.

show abstract

Introduction: Research and practice in chemical education in advanced courses

Cited by 20 publications

References 38 publications

Culturing reality: How organic chemistry graduate students develop into practitioners

Culturing reality: How organic chemistry graduate students develop into practitioners

College chemistry students' mental models of acids and acid strength

Research on Students' Understanding of Michaelis-Menten Kinetics and Enzyme Inhibition: Implications for Instruction and Learning

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About