Organic chemistry is a required course sequence for many STEM students. However, research indicates that organic chemistry reaction mechanisms are especially challenging for students due to a mixture of underlying conceptual difficulties, the process-oriented thinking inherent to the discipline, and the representations commonly used to depict…

Thirty-six students enrolled in Organic Chemistry II participated in individual, semistructured, think-aloud interviews about the factors that contribute to the stability and reactivity of organic species in the context of unimolecular and bimolecular nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions. The students were provided with the…

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) has been used to assess student understanding of introductory concepts of electricity and magnetism because many of the items on the CSEM have strong distractor choices which correspond to students' alternate conceptions. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know…

Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including electrostatics and quantum mechanics. To better understand the difficulties students encounter when utilizing the…

Students often face difficulties when presented with chemical structures and asked to relate them to properties of those substances. Learning to relate structures to properties, both in predicting properties based on chemical structures and interpreting properties to infer structure, is pivotal in students' education in chemistry. This troublesome…

The goal of this investigation was to determine which reading instruction improves multiple science text comprehension for college student readers. The authors first identified the cognitive processing strategies that are predictive of multiple science text comprehension (Study 1) and then used what they learned to experimentally test the…

Students who harbor misconceptions often find chemistry difficult to understand. To improve teaching about the dissolving process, first semester introductory chemistry students were asked to complete a free-response questionnaire on writing balanced equations for dissolving ionic compounds in water. To corroborate errors and misconceptions…

The problem-solving strategies of students enrolled in general chemistry courses have been the subject of numerous research investigations. In most cases, the investigators were interested in the specific areas or concepts that posed the greatest difficulty to a student's success in achieving the correct answer. However, the investigation reported…

This study examines the epistemic beliefs about justification employed by physics undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the context of solving a standard classical physics problem and a frontier physics problem. Data were collected by a think-aloud problem solving session followed by a semi-structured interview conducted with 50…

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine students' visual attention when solving a multiple-choice science problem. Six university students participated in a problem-solving task to predict occurrences of landslide hazards from four images representing four combinations of four factors. Participants' responses and visual attention…

In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred sixty-two students from a calculus-based and an algebra-based introductory physics course were given a quiz in the…

This study describes the conceptual understanding for a series of fundamental organic concepts by fourth year chemistry students from a midsize, southeastern, state university. Student volunteers (n = 19) participated in semi-structured interviews using a think aloud protocol. The interview questions were eleven multiple choice questions selected…

Students learned about electrical circuits in an arcade-type game consisting of 10 levels. For example, in one level students saw two circuits consisting of various batteries and resistors connected in series or parallel, and had to indicate which one had a higher rate of moving current. On levels 1-9, all students received a correct tone and had…

Self-explaining is a domain-independent learning strategy that generally leads to a robust understanding of the domain material. However, there are two potential explanations for its effectiveness. First, self-explanation generates additional "content" that does not exist in the instructional materials. Second, when compared to…

This study examined the impact of two epistemic commitments on the quality of college students' scientific reasoning in the domain of hydrostatics. These were the commitment to the consistency of theory with prior knowledge and commitment to the consistency of theory with evidence. Participants were 12 sophomore science majors enrolled in a large…