Organic reaction mechanisms are often represented by the electron-pushing formalism and reaction coordinate diagrams. These representations pose a challenge to students because valuable information is encoded within each representation, and students must know how to reason about mechanisms using both. Hence, it is important to understand whether…

Student affect is an important factor in the learning process and may be especially important in gateway courses such as organic chemistry. Students' recognition of the relevance of the content they are learning and interactions with their peers can support their motivation to learn. Herein, we describe a study focused on how Writing-to-Learn…

Reasoning about organic chemistry reaction mechanisms requires engagement with multiple concepts and necessitates balancing the relative influence of different chemical properties. A goal of organic chemistry instruction is to support students with engaging in this type of reasoning. In this study, we describe our use of case comparison problems…

Teaching organic chemistry requires supporting learning strategies that meaningfully engage students with the challenging concepts and advanced problem-solving skills needed to be successful. Such meaningful learning experiences should encourage students to actively choose to incorporate new concepts into their existing knowledge frameworks by…

Many recent studies document the difficulties that students experience when learning organic chemistry, often due to the complex visualization and reasoning skills required to successfully understand the ways molecules interact in specific environments. Many of these studies call on instructors to improve their teaching strategies to support…

Learning to reason through organic reaction mechanisms is challenging for students because of the volume of reactions covered in introductory organic chemistry and the complexity of conceptual knowledge and reasoning skills required to develop meaningful understanding. However, understanding reaction mechanisms is valuable for students because…

An understanding of acid-base reactions is necessary for success in chemistry courses and relevant to careers outside of chemistry, yet research has demonstrated that students often struggle with learning acid-base reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry. One response to this challenge is the development of educational applications to support…

Science educators recognize the need to teach scientific ways of knowing and reasoning in addition to scientific knowledge. However, characterizing and assessing scientific ways of knowing and reasoning is challenging. Writing-to-learn offers one way of eliciting and supporting students' reasoning; further, writing serves to externalize and make…

Promoting students' ability to engage in discipline-specific practices is a central goal of chemistry education. Yet if instruction is to meaningfully foster such ability, we must first understand students' reasoning during these practices. By characterizing constraints on chemistry students' reasoning, we can design instruction that targets this…

Graduate students play a critical role in undergraduate education at doctoral-granting institutions and yet their training is often brief and overgeneralized. Little is known about how they develop knowledge for teaching chemistry in this context. To further understand how graduate students develop knowledge for teaching, we used a questionnaire…

Acid-base chemistry is a foundational topic that is taught in courses across the chemistry curriculum. Students often have difficulty distinguishing between the different theories of acid-base chemistry--Brønsted-Lowry and Lewis acid-base chemistry--and applying these two definitions correctly in unfamiliar scenarios. To help students learn these…