The ability to use evidence to generate a persuasive argument in supporting a scientific claim is an important component of a chemistry education. However, the process of learning to engage in this type of chemical reasoning has been shown to be difficult for students. In many cases, students appear to rely on an initial intuitive response when answering a question and then struggle to provide appropriate support for their answer. Additionally, in a free-response style question, the reasoning support that students do supply can be difficult and time consuming to interpret and categorize. As a means to help develop student reasoning skills, and to do so in such a way that the results are more quickly interpreted for trends and common incorrect reasoning pathways, we have adapted a novel tool from the Physics Education Research literature known as the Reasoning Chain Construction Task (“chaining tasks”). In this tool, students are provided with a limited number of true statements from which they must generate a reasoning chain to support their answer to a question. Using this tool does not affect the distribution of student responses relative to a multiple choice question, but the reasoning chain component provides a clearer picture of the reasoning that students deem appropriate to support their answer. In this talk, we will report examples of the use of chaining tasks in a first-semester General Chemistry course.

When good information goes bad: A new tool for tracking reasoning support for different answer options

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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