A commonly held belief within higher education is that in order to be successful at organic chemistry, one must be adept at recognizing patterns and applying patterns to new situations.  Previous research has looked at how the approach of pattern recognition (and what one looks for) differs between novices and experts.  Based on some of this work, we have begun a study looking at how students group reaction mechanisms and what patterns they look for in making those groupings.   Students as novice learners tend to focus on the details of a reaction that are not as important instead of the mechanistic similarities that experts use.  Furthermore, it seems that students who are more skilled at pattern recognition appear to become more adept at recognizing reagents that lead to specific products quickly, which hinders their desire to examine the reaction in greater depth mechanistically.  More detailed findings of this study will be presented.

Probing the origin of student pattern recognition in the organic chemistry classroom

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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