For five semesters, activities have been incorporated into first year general chemistry courses to help build student conceptual chemistry knowledge. The activities follow a learning cycle pedagogy (similar to POGIL) and consist of guiding questions involving animations, models, simulations, or a data set and are completed by students working in groups. The efficacy of the learning cycle approach and learning outcomes from POGIL and other similar initiatives have been well studied; however, scholars have not yet explored how student concept development progresses while students are engaged in such activities in a chemistry classroom. This study aims to capture students’ performance when completing the activities as a way to assess any discrepancies in conceptual knowledge and answer the following research questions: 1) Which guiding questions generate inaccurate or diverse responses? 2) How can data be used to reword questions to improve concept construction in future implementations? Data were collected from 140 students in a first semester general chemistry course on days when learning cycle activities were implemented. Students slipped carbon paper under their work to provide investigators with duplicates of their in-class answers to questions from the activity. The copies were analyzed to focus on specific questions known to elicit inaccurate ideas (i.e., address popular misconceptions). However, for activities that did not have questions framed around popular misconceptions, copies were sampled from the data corpus, and their responses examined to identify questions prompting a large variety of responses. Once questions of interest were identified, student responses to prior and following questions were analyzed to better understand students’ progression of ideas and ways to improve the quality of the activities. This analytic method has promise for improving instructional materials while providing insights on student conceptual understanding in general chemistry. Results and implications for research and teaching will be presented.<br/>

Learning in the moment: Identifying and improving student conceptual knowledge construction in general chemistry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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