Representations are ubiquitous in chemistry because they enable the communication of submicroscopic and macroscopic phenomena: central components in the study of chemistry. Representational competence is a set of skills that allow the use of representations to think about, communicate, and create meaning for chemical phenomena. Numerous studies have investigated the translation skill (i.e., the ability to map features of one type of representation onto those of another and to explain the relationship between them); however, there is little consensus about what it means to be competent with this skill. This work presents a novel way to characterize the translation skill using students’ answers and reasoning. We conducted semi-structured interviews to investigate how students <i>translate</i> between representations of molecular structure: condensed structures, Lewis structures, skeletal structures, dash-wedge diagrams, Newman projections, and chair conformations. Using constant comparative analysis, we identified and categorized 20 reasoning strategies students used during these translation tasks. We investigated patterns in how students solved the tasks to explore levels of student competence. This talk describes our approach and illustrates the complexities of measuring a single skill within the representational competence framework.

Investigating student representational competence and reasoning when translating between representations of molecular structure

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