Representations in chemistry are the tools by which students, instructors, and chemists reason with chemical concepts that are abstract. Although representations are regularly used within the chemistry classroom, there is more to uncover regarding the ways students interact with representations when given chemistry tasks. This study aimed to…

Asking students to explain why phenomena occur at a molecular level is vital to increasing their understanding of chemistry concepts. One way to elicit students' mechanistic reasoning and guide construction of knowledge is through Writing-to-Learn (WTL), which is a promising approach for students in organic chemistry courses. In the design of WTL…

The concept of delocalization (i.e., resonance) is fundamental concept in organic chemistry but essential learning outcomes (LOs) have not previously been proposed nor has there been an analysis of how resonance is taught, despite indications in the literature that students have many non-canonical ideas about the concepts. To address this deficit,…

Atomic/molecular visualization for human sight is usually generated by a software that reproduces a 3D reality on a 2D screen. Although Virtual Reality (VR) software was originally developed for the gaming industry, now it is used in academia for chemistry teaching. This work reviews the scientific literature on 3D visualization in stereoscopic…

Models that are used to predict and explain phenomena related to molecular vibration and rotation are ubiquitous in physical chemistry, and are of importance in many related fields. Yet, little work has been done to characterize student use and application of these models. We describe the results of a multi-year, multi-institutional qualitative…

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information.…

For six semesters, activities have been incorporated into first year general chemistry courses in an effort to build student conceptual chemistry knowledge. The activities follow a learning cycle pedagogy (similar to Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning or POGIL activities) and consist of guiding questions involving animations, models,…

This paper describes two studies comparing students' explanations of an oxidation-reduction reaction after viewing the chemical demonstration and one of two different particulate-level computer animations. In the first study, the two animations differed primarily in the complexity of the visual images. Students viewing the more simplified…

Many undergraduate chemistry students struggle to understand the concept of stereoisomers, molecules that have the same molecular formula and sequence of bonded atoms but are different in how their atoms are oriented in space. Our goal in this study is to improve stereoisomer instruction by getting participants actively involved in the lesson.…

A laboratory is a large investment of time and money for departments of chemistry yet discussions continue about its purpose in the educational process. Helping students navigate the three levels of representation; macroscopic, particulate and symbolic is a potential use of this time. This study looked at two different types of visualization for…

This study aimed to identify the needs of a 10th grade congenitally blind student in an inclusive chemistry classroom and design and develop tactile materials to teach the 'energy in living systems' topic with particular emphasis on covering the symbolic language of the chemistry. A single case study design was used to carry out an in-depth and…

Misconceptions are the "the old, the bad, and the ugly" prior knowledge, ideas or conceptions that the learners have that hinder their further learning in science. Several types of misconceptions that undergraduate students hold about reaction coordinate diagrams (from here on we use the term "reaction coordinate diagrams" and…

In this reply to Elon Langbeheim's response to an article recently published in this journal, authors Smith and Villarreal identify several types of general chemistry students' misconceptions concerning the concept of particle position during physical change. They focus their response on one of the misconceptions identified as such: Given a solid…

Identifying students' misconceptions and learning difficulties and finding effective ways of addressing them has been one of the major concerns in chemistry education. However, the chemistry education community has paid little attention to determining discipline-specific aspects of chemistry that can lead to learning difficulties and…

Research on mechanistic thinking in organic chemistry has shown that students attribute little meaning to the electron-pushing (i.e., curved arrow) formalism. At the University of Ottawa, a new curriculum has been developed in which students are taught the electron-pushing formalism prior to instruction on specific reactions--this formalism is…