Collaborative tasks in which students work together in the classroom to answer a question or to solve a problem are of central importance in active learning approaches to teaching chemistry.   A variety of tools have been developed to observe students’ interactions when working on these in-class activities.  Many of these tools focus on the social processing that takes place in the group or on students’ discourse moves. In this presentation we will discuss and describe an approach to in-class task analysis that rather focused on mapping the specific chemical concepts and ideas invoked by students to confront the task.  We also analyzed how students use such concepts and ideas and what factors affected their reasoning.  Participants in our qualitative study were enrolled in a general chemistry course that follows an alternative chemistry curriculum (Chemical Thinking) that seeks to foster meaningful conceptual understanding of core ideas in the discipline.  The observed class was taught in a collaborative learning space that aimed to facilitate student collaboration in groups of four to six.

Investigating students’ chemical thinking during collaborative tasks

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