Stacey Lowery Bretz has been instrumental in characterizing undergraduate students’ interpretation of and reasoning with representations through the development of concept inventories to assess students’ thinking and confidence with chemical concepts. Specifically, previous research on students’ understanding of reaction coordinate diagrams using the developed Reaction Coordinate Diagram Inventory (RCDI) has significantly contributed to our work. Our research group focuses on investigating how undergraduate students view and interpret widely used chemistry representations that depict complex and abstract chemical concepts at multiple time points throughout the undergraduate curriculum. As a part of this work, we are currently investigating undergraduate organic chemistry students’ underlying cognitive processes and attentional areas of focus while completing representational tasks related to stereochemistry. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected via eye tracking coupled with verbal articulation through retrospective think aloud interviews. Tasks involved answering questions related to the comparison, completion, transformation, and generation of chemistry representations. Preliminary findings and potential implications will be discussed.

Investigating undergraduate students’ cognitive processes when viewing organic chemistry representations

ACS Spring 2022

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