In a world facing complex global issues and increasingly being dominated by fake news, citizens in any country need to develop proficiency in understanding and reasoning from evidence. In parallel with these issues, national reforms in science education in the US have identified the need for science curricula to provide students with opportunities to develop their reasoning throughout their science education. However, research in chemistry education has found that these practices are presently absent in chemistry courses, leading to calls for new teaching approaches and activities that introduce these ideas to chemistry students. Included in these calls are the need for assessments which move beyond reciting memorized rules and instead allow students to demonstrate their capacities to reason from evidence. Inspired by recent efforts in chemistry education research, the University of Ottawa’s organic chemistry curriculum incorporates classroom activities and assessment items which emphasize the explicit teaching and assessment of (1) constructing causal explanations of scientific phenomena and (2) engaging in argumentation from evidence – two key features of reasoning from evidence. This refinement has provided the opportunity to investigate and identify patterns of students’ reasoning on organic chemistry assessments. This presentation will highlight and compare findings from two mixed methods research studies characterizing students’ reasoning on two assessment items from a single 2017 final exam in organic chemistry (<i>N</i> = 178): (i) discussing why one reaction mechanism is more likely than another, and (ii) discussing why one of three bases would most favourably drive a given equilibrium towards products. This presentation will also discuss how refinements to both assessments and curriculum have impacted students’ reasoning on the latter of these assessment items between 2017 and 2018 course years. Lastly, we will discuss how findings from this work have informed refinements to these assessment items.

Characterizing students’ abilities to reason about “why” on organic chemistry assessments

2019 Fall National Meeting

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