The affordances of Writing-to-Learn as an instructional practice are well documented. However, all writing assignments are not equally effective at promoting learning. To better understand the impact of assignment design on students’ reasoning when writing about an organic mechanism, we examined student writing in a second-semester organic chemistry course. Students wrote in response to an assignment designed to elicit students’ reasoning about an acid-catalyzed hydrolysis reaction. This assignment was administered as two versions—both containing the problem statement asking students to explain the hydrolysis mechanism, but one with rhetorical elements (audience, genre, background information) and one without rhetorical elements. Analysis of the student writing focused on first developing a method to quantify the relative sophistication of students’ reasoning. The results were then compared to identify the similarities and differences in students’ reasoning between the two assignment types. Specifically, we compared the degree to which students exhibited mechanistic reasoning, how well the two prompts elicited successful reasoning in students’ writing, and how students’ reasoning differed between the prompts. Preliminary results suggest that the way students present their reasoning does not differ between the two groups, but that the presence of rhetorical elements does lead students to writing mechanistic explanations more concisely.

Analyzing the relationship between assignment design and reasoning patterns in students’ writing about organic mechanisms

2019 Spring National Meeting

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