Thinking Like a Chemist: Development of a Chemistry Card-Sorting Task To Probe Conceptual Expertise

Abstract

An underlying goal in most chemistry curricula is to enable students to think like chemists, yet there is much evidence to suggest that students can learn to solve problems without thinking conceptually like a chemist. There are few tools, however, that assess whether students are learning to think like Ph.D. faculty, putative experts in the field. Here, we present a card-sorting task that probes how individuals organize information about problems in chemistry. Chemistry faculty tend to organize around "deep" features centered on fundamental ideas in chemistry while novices tend to organize around "surface" features such as problem presentation or specific vocabulary. We used established statistical techniques from card-sorting tasks in other fields and introduce a new quantitative measure that compares individual performance on the sorting task to faculty and novices that is hypothesis-independent. Initial results indicate that the card-sorting task is effective at distinguishing between populations of faculty and novices in chemistry and can be used to track progress toward more expert-like thinking over time through a chemistry education program.

An online categorization task to investigate changes in students' interpretations of organic chemistry reactions

“…The findings from this work illustrated the differences between novices and experts, in which novices used diverse levels of interpretation including static features (i.e., Identical structural features , and Similar properties of structure ) and process‐oriented features (i.e., Similar reaction type and Similar mechanism ), while experts primarily used the Similar mechanism level (Galloway, Leung, et al, ). These findings are consistent with the previous literature across disciplines, demonstrating that experts approached problems differently than novices, including that experts tended to attend to the conceptual or deep features within a problem (Chi et al, ; Hoskinson et al, ; Krieter et al, ; Randles & Overton, ). The present study explored how the previous findings extend to a larger context, analyzing students' categorization choices, abilities, and changes over time.…”

“…Previous work has demonstrated that novices tend to rely on surface‐level features when faced with a problem (Chi et al, ; Krieter et al, ; Mason & Singh, ). This present study found predominant sorting by surface features initially but an increase in sorting by deeper, more process‐oriented methods later in the curriculum, following explicit instruction and practice as part of the curriculum.…”

“…Categorization tasks have been used to probe the difference between experts and novices in many different disciplines of education research, including physics (Chi et al, ; Mason & Singh, , ; Singh, ), biology (Bissonnette et al, ; Hoskinson, Maher, Bekkering, & Ebert‐May, ; J. I. Smith et al, ; M. U. Smith, ), computer sciences (McCauley et al, ), and chemistry (Domin, Al‐Masum, & Mensah, ; Graulich & Bhattacharyya, ; Irby et al, ; Kozma & Russell, ; Krieter, Julius, Tanner, Bush, & Scott, ; Stains & Talanquer, ). These studies may employ one‐on‐one interviews (Chi et al, ; Galloway, Leung, et al, , ; Snyder, ), but can also be administered in larger class settings (Krieter et al, ; Lin & Singh, ; Mason & Singh, , ; J. I. Smith et al, ).…”

“…In a closed (i.e., framed) sort, a participant is asked to sort items into a set of predetermined categories. Studies using a closed sort task often use categories that aim to explicitly cue participants to hypothesized deep features (Krieter et al, ; J. I. Smith et al, ). These studies effectively demonstrated the utility of predetermined categories for increasing a participant's probability of sorting based on these deep features in both novices and experts, and gave insights into the participants' ability to sort in a given way (Krieter et al, ; J. I. Smith et al, ).…”

“…Studies using a closed sort task often use categories that aim to explicitly cue participants to hypothesized deep features (Krieter et al, ; J. I. Smith et al, ). These studies effectively demonstrated the utility of predetermined categories for increasing a participant's probability of sorting based on these deep features in both novices and experts, and gave insights into the participants' ability to sort in a given way (Krieter et al, ; J. I. Smith et al, ). Studies have also used an open sort in conjunction with a closed sort (or framed sort) to investigate participants' choices and preferences and to investigate their ability to sort in a given way (Bissonnette et al, ; Krieter et al, ; J. I. Smith et al, ).…”