Solving the authentic problems that organic chemists face on a regular basis requires more than just a memorized list of reactions and isolated facts.  Reasoning with and applying one’s content knowledge is a distinct skill that is often underemphasized in the organic classroom.  Additionally, the most successful chemists have developed a robust set of problem solving strategies for answering common domain-specific questions, including knowing how and when to use tools like energy diagrams, Newman projections, or pK<sub>a</sub> values.  Although these are common parts of an organic curriculum, they are frequently presented as stand-alone questions, rather than as powerful tools that can contribute to solving more fundamental problems.<br/><br/>We hypothesize that assisting students to develop a broad set of contextualized problem solving strategies as an integral part of an organic chemistry course will enable students to better articulate and apply the content knowledge that they are gaining.  We are currently piloting an intervention in which students are given explicit guidance about how to approach the most common problems they encounter, with a particular emphasis on predicting organic reactivity.  This intervention draws upon observations from the literature that describe the different ways in which novices and experts approach organic chemistry problems.  Think-aloud problem solving interviews will be used as the primary method for evaluating student outcomes, because they provide access to an especially rich set of data about student thinking.  We are also developing written assessments to probe student reasoning on a larger scale than interviews allow.  A theoretical construct map has been developed to describe the ways in which chemists at different levels of expertise might approach and discuss an organic reactivity problem.  This construct, the overall structure of our intervention, and preliminary observations will be presented.

Developing domain-specific reasoning and problem solving skills in organic chemistry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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