Learning and communicating with representations is an essential component of chemistry instruction. The process of successfully using multiple representations to think about, communicate, and create meaning for a phenomenon defines representational competence. An understanding of how students develop and use representational competence skills requires a holistic account of the nature and interactions of multiple complex factors. Schönborn and Anderson proposed an empirical model that suggests that learning with representations is affected by the external graphical features of a representation (mode), scientific knowledge of relevance to that representation (conceptual), cognitive skills that a student must utilize to make sense of that representation (reasoning), as well as the interactions between all these factors. As suggested, students’ overall ability to develop representational competence skills depends on the nature of the contribution of each factor when students employ various representational competence skills. In this talk, I will discuss how we employed Schönborn and Anderson’s model to characterize organic chemistry students’ representational competence with representations of molecular structure. This work demonstrates that the appropriateness of student reasoning can vary across tasks focusing on different representations, different representational competence skills, and depending on whether the student attends to the external graphical features of a representation or the conceptual information embedded in the mode of a representation.

Representational competence under the magnifying glass: The interplay between student reasoning skills, conceptual understanding, and the nature of representations

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.