Success in Organic Chemistry requires an understanding of how organic reactions occur.  Learning a specific organic mechanism requires structural knowledge of any intermediates coupled with the use of curved arrows that show how electrons move to form the intermediate(s) and product.  Experience has shown that students cannot learn a mechanism by simply copying an instructor’s work - even when the class notes contain multiple instances of a specific mechanism.  Students need the requirement of an assignment to push them to attempt this knowledge retrieval from their own memory constructs.  A low-stakes, spaced assignment that transfers this mechanistic knowledge to long-term memory has been developed.  In the assignment, students use an interactive drawing palette to show the mechanism, complete with curved arrows, intermediates, and charges.  The assignment is low-stakes in that incorrect responses do not reduce the available points.  Students repeatedly retrieve the components of a mechanism until they can submit a 100% correct mechanism in an instructor-determined span of time.  The spaced nature of this approach guarantees that the developing memory constructs become denser each time the mechanism is re-assigned.

Learning organic mechanisms through spaced assignments

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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