Both graph comprehension and data analysis and interpretation are influenced by one's prior knowledge and experiences. To understand how one's prior knowledge and experiences interact with their analysis of a graph, we conducted think-aloud interviews with general chemistry students as they interpreted a graph to determine optimal conditions for…

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…

Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly acquired observations, or change their apparatus to better represent their models when they encounter discrepancies…

In this study, we continue our efforts to address students' difficulties understanding organic chemistry, particularly in connecting structure to function and using the language of chemistry to explain how and why reactions occur. For the first time, we have characterized students' work and problem-solving strategies on familiar and unfamiliar…

Problem solving is a critical feature of highly quantitative physical science topics, such as chemical kinetics. In order to solve a problem, students must cue into relevant features, ignore irrelevant features, and choose among potential problem-solving approaches. However, what is considered appropriate or productive for problem solving is…

First-year courses have been used to bolster college student success, but empirical evidence on their efficacy is mixed. We investigated whether a first-year science of learning course, focused on self-regulated learning, would benefit first-generation college students. We randomly assigned students to a treatment condition involving enrollment in…

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…

Zero-order systems provide an interesting opportunity for students to think about the underlying mechanism behind the physical phenomena being modeled. The work reported here is part of a larger study that seeks to characterize how students integrate chemistry and mathematics in the context of chemical kinetics. Thirty-six general chemistry…

Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of troubleshooting. However, that work has focused primarily on "individual" students' metacognitive processes…

Transfer of learning, the application of learning to different contexts over time, is important to all learning for development. As 21st century skills specifically aim to be "generic," there is an assumption that they can be transferred from context to context. We investigate the process of transfer in problem solving, with specific…

The purpose of this study was to elucidate and describe students' thinking when making connections between substitution and elimination reactions and their corresponding reaction coordinate diagrams. Thirty-six students enrolled in organic chemistry II participated in individual, semi-structured interviews. Three major themes were identified that…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics problems in an upper-division physics course. Using the lens of epistemological framing, we investigated four…

Reasoning skills have been clearly related to achievement in introductory undergraduate biology, a course with a high failure rate that may contribute to dropout from undergraduate STEM majors. Existing measures are focused on the experimental method, such as generating hypotheses, choosing a research method, how to control variables other than…

A growing body of scholarly work indicates that student performance on physics problems stems from many factors, including relevant conceptual understanding. However, in contexts in which significant conceptual difficulties have been documented via research, it can be difficult to pinpoint and isolate such factors because students' written and…

This paper describes the results of a comparative study into the approaches used by science undergraduates when solving open-ended problems. This study adopted a pseudo-grounded theory framework to analyse six case studies, one from each of the science disciplines studied. The study involved 70 participants from 5 institutions solving open-ended…