While uncertainty is inherent to doing science, it is often excluded from science instruction, especially postsecondary chemistry instruction. There are a variety of barriers to infusing uncertainty into the postsecondary chemistry classroom, including ensuring "productive" struggle with uncertainty, evaluating student engagement with…

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…

Errors are natural elements of the learning process and provide a high potential to promote students' learning outcomes. In recent years, there has been much research about learning from errors. However, we know little about the relationship between students' error beliefs in chemistry and chemistry learning outcomes at present. Thus, the aim of…

With the urgent goal of increasing student retention within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, STEM identity is highlighted as a powerful source of student persistence. Since chemistry is an important part of the STEM discipline, a growing body of research has focused on chemistry identity. However, we currently know…

The rise of technology and online approaches has challenged the traditional learning and teaching model for first year chemistry of formal face-to-face lectures and in-person laboratory sessions. The COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 has created a rapidly changing environment in assessment and learning experiences for students and led to rapid adoption…

Within chemistry education, there are various curricular and pedagogical approaches that aim to improve teaching and learning in chemistry. Efforts to characterize these transformations have primarily focused on student reasoning and performance, and little work has been done to explore student perceptions of curricular and pedagogical…

Learning progressions (LPs) are novel models for the development of assessments in science education, that often use a scale to categorize students' levels of reasoning. Pictorial representations are important in chemistry teaching and learning, and also in LPs, but the differences between pictorial and verbal items in chemistry LPs is unclear. In…

Today, science education demands preparation of scientifically literate people, emphasizing more the process of working with information than owning it. Such a task requires a deep understanding of pedagogical content knowledge by science teachers. This study focuses on revealing the beliefs of prospective chemistry teachers during their teaching…

The theory of learning approaches has proven to be one of the most powerful theories explaining university students' learning. However, learning approaches are sensitive to the situation and the content of learning. Chemistry has its own specific features that should be considered when exploring chemistry students' learning habits, specifically…

Around 1960, there were quite radical changes in emphasis in many countries in school chemistry education, with subsequent changes in many university courses. Considerable research was undertaken to explore the learning problems students were reporting and the common thread underlying became apparent: it related to the way humans process new…

This paper is based on a qualitative study of seven students enrolled in a two-semester organic chemistry course for chemistry and chemical engineering majors that focused on the reasoning the students had used to answer questions on the course exams. Narrative analysis was applied to create case records for each participant that were then…