For six 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. Last year, an activity was implemented in a first semester general chemistry course that focused on energy changes during bond breaking and bond making. The data showed that, even after working with the Atomic Interactions simulation guided by the activity, about half of the students (n=55) still thought bond-breaking was an exothermic process, even though they collected data from the simulation that indicated otherwise. After analyzing student answers, the activity was redesigned to help improve concept development. This poster presents students’ performance when completing the redesigned activity to assess further discrepancies in conceptual knowledge and answer the following research questions: 1) To what extent do answers demonstrate improvement in students’ conceptual understanding over the previous year? 2) How can the activity be further improved? Data were collected from 100 students in a first semester general chemistry course on days when learning cycle activities were implemented. Students completed the activity in class and sent a picture of the completed activity to researchers. The pictures were analyzed to assess the similarities and differences in conceptual understanding for the new activity and the prior activity. Results and implications for research and teaching will be presented. <br/>

Data-driven curriculum reform: Energy changes during bond making and breaking

255th National Meeting (2018)

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