The use of representations to communicate scientific information is essential in chemistry. During the first semester of organic chemistry, instructors spend extensive time guiding students to find meaning from molecular structure. One way to characterize students’ understanding of structural representations is to examine their representational competence. Representational competence is a set of skills and practices that allow a person to reflectively use a variety of representations to think about and communicate chemical phenomena. An interview protocol was designed to investigate student representational competence with condensed structures, Lewis structures, skeletal structures, dash-wedge diagrams, Newman projections, and chair conformations. We conducted semi-structured think-aloud interviews with twelve Organic Chemistry I participants. We used constant comparative analysis to characterize the strategies participants used to translate between representations. The broader objective of this analysis is to develop a construct to evaluate representational competence. Preliminary results will be discussed.

Characterizing how organic chemistry students translate between representations of chemical structure

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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