Reasoning about Reactions in Organic Chemistry: Starting It in General Chemistry

Abstract

The study presented here is a follow-up to a previous report in which we investigated how general-chemistry students in a transformed curriculum reason about simple acid–base reactions. In the present study, we use and adapt the previously developed coding scheme for a longitudinal study in which we follow students from general chemistry through organic chemistry. We find that (i) generally, the manner in which students reason about acid–base reactions increases in sophistication over the course of a two-semester sequence of organic chemistry; (ii) there is little difference in reasoning between students at the end of a transformed general-chemistry course and a similar cohort at the beginning of organic chemistry; (iii) the nature of a student’s general-chemistry experience has a profound effect on the sophistication of their reasoning in that students from a transformed general-chemistry course are more likely to provide causal mechanistic explanations for simple acid–base reactions than students with other general-chemistry experiences; and (iv) the type of acid–base reaction that the students discuss impacts the type of reasoning they exhibit. We find that when asked to explain a Lewis acid–base reaction, students are less likely to invoke electrostatic ideas.

Students' use of chemistry core ideas to explain the structure and stability of DNA

“…These forms of validity enable us to generate evidence against the threats to the validity of the results obtained from the multiple implementations of the DNA activity. In addition to establishing the validity of activity, we support the reliability of our analysis by calculating the inter‐rater reliability with Cohen's kappa ( κ ), a commonly used coefficient in our field 56–59 . During the analysis process, raters received directions on the coding scheme and how to record their coding.…”

“…In addition to establishing the validity of activity, we support the reliability of our analysis by calculating the inter-rater reliability with Cohen's kappa (κ), a commonly used coefficient in our field. [56][57][58][59] During the analysis process, raters received directions on the coding scheme and how to record their coding. One rater coded a set of student responses for a cohort, a second rater coded a random 20% of the data set from the same cohort, and we obtained κ values ranging from 0.9 to 1.0 depending on the specific question (see Supporting Information S.7 for the Cohen's κ ranges).…”

Concept Inventories as a Complement to Learning Progressions

“…Such an HLP would span multiple courses and provide a framework to allow for better articula-tion between courses and instructors. There have been only a few examples of LPs or proto-LPs that map students' movement through multiple university-level courses and examine the handoff from one instructor to another (Marbach-Ad et al, 2007;Cooper et al, 2012;Cooper and Klymkowsky, 2013;Crandell et al, 2019).…”

Assessment in Chemistry Education

“…By revising the prompt to ask students first to explain how, and second to explain why a process occurred, many more students produced sophisticated causal mechanistic explanations for the phenomenon . Students in a transformed course that emphasized 3‐dimensional learning and mechanistic reasoning constructed significantly more sophisticated explanations than students enrolled in traditional courses, and this difference was maintained throughout another semester of organic chemistry …”