A deep understanding of organic chemistry requires a learner to understand many concepts and have fluency with multiple skills. This understanding is particularly necessary for constructing and using mechanisms to explain chemical reactions. Electrophilicity and nucleophilicity are two fundamental concepts to learning and understanding reaction…

Motivation helps drive students to success in general chemistry, and active learning environments with social interactions has consistently shown to improve motivation. However, analyzing student outcomes in an interactive environment is best done by considering students not as isolated units but as working together and influencing each other.…

Reaction mechanisms are central to organic chemistry and organic chemistry education. Assessing understanding of reaction mechanisms can be evaluated holistically, wherein the entire mechanism is considered; however, we assert that such an evaluation does not account for how learners variably understand mechanistic components (e.g., nucleophile,…

Building domain knowledge is essential to a student's success in any course. Chemistry, similar to other STEM disciplines, has a strong cumulative element (i.e., topic areas continuously build upon prior coursework). We employed the testing effect, in the form of post-exam retrieval quizzes, as a way to improve students' understanding of chemistry…

Acid-base chemistry is a key reaction motif taught in postsecondary organic chemistry courses. More specifically, concepts from the Lewis acid-base model are broadly applicable to understanding mechanistic ideas such as electron density, nucleophilicity, and electrophilicity; thus, the Lewis model is fundamental to explaining an array of reaction…

Assessments that aim to evaluate student understanding of chemical reactions and reaction mechanisms should ask students to construct written or oral explanations of mechanistic representations; students can reproduce pictorial mechanism representations with minimal understanding of the meaning of the representations. Grading such assessments is…