Incorporating an Environmental Research Project Across Three STEM Courses: A Collaboration between Ecology, Organic Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry Students

2012 ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Latch ◽  
W. Lindsay Whitlow ◽  
Peter J. Alaimo
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Chemistry ◽  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Chemistry Students

Island Explorations: Discovering Effects of Environmental Research-Based Lab Activities on Analytical Chemistry Students

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (11) ◽  
pp. 1887-1894 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Hall Tomasik ◽  
Dale LeCaptain ◽  
Sarah Murphy ◽  
Mary Martin ◽  
Rachel M. Knight ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Chemistry ◽  
Environmental Research ◽  
Chemistry Students

The role of authentic contexts and social elements in supporting organic chemistry students’ interactions with writing-to-learn assignments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Petterson ◽  
Solaire A. Finkenstaedt-Quinn ◽  
Anne Ruggles Gere ◽  
Ginger V. Shultz
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Peer Interactions ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Writing To Learn ◽  
Student Interest ◽  
Student Interactions ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Student Affect ◽  
Survey Responses

Student affect is an important factor in the learning process and may be especially important in gateway courses such as organic chemistry. Students’ recognition of the relevance of the content they are learning and interactions with their peers can support their motivation to learn. Herein, we describe a study focused on how Writing-to-Learn assignments situate organic chemistry content within relevant contexts and incorporate social elements to support positive student interactions with organic chemistry. These assignments incorporate rhetorical elements—an authentic context, role, genre, and audience—to support student interest and demonstrate the relevance of the content. In addition, students engage in the processes of peer review and revision to support their learning. We identified how the authentic contexts and peer interactions incorporated into two Writing-to-Learn assignments supported students’ interactions with the assignments and course content by analyzing student interviews and supported by feedback survey responses. Our results indicate that assignments incorporating these elements can support student affect and result in students’ perceived learning, but that there should be careful consideration of the relevance of the chosen contexts with respect to the interests of the students enrolled in the course and the complexity of the contexts.

Organic chemistry students’ challenges with coherence formation between reactions and reaction coordinate diagrams

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 732-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maia Popova ◽  
Stacey Lowery Bretz
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Reaction Mechanisms ◽  
Reaction Coordinate ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Student Difficulties ◽  
Need Support ◽  
Elimination Reactions

The purpose of this study was to elucidate and describe students’ thinking when making connections between substitution and elimination reactions and their corresponding reaction coordinate diagrams. Thirty-six students enrolled in organic chemistry II participated in individual, semi-structured interviews. Three major themes were identified that characterize students’ difficulties with integrating the information from the reactions and the reaction coordinate diagrams: incorrect ideas about the meanings of the reaction coordinate diagrams’ features, errors when examining reaction mechanisms, and an inability to assess the relative energies of reaction species. These findings suggest that students need support for coherence formation between reactions and reaction coordinate diagrams. Implications for teaching to address these student difficulties are suggested.

TMI (Too much information)! Effects of given information on organic chemistry students’ approaches to solving mechanism tasks

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria DeCocq ◽  
Gautam Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
External Representation ◽  
Reaction Products ◽  
Representational System ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Line Angle ◽  
Problem Solving Strategy

We report our qualitative study of twenty-four students enrolled in the second-semester of a second-year undergraduate (sophomore-level) organic chemistry course, Organic Two. We asked the research participants to propose the product and electron-pushing mechanism of elementary mechanistic steps in the absence and presence of the corresponding overall transformation. We also asked the students about their preferences of representational systems when working on tasks common to Organic Two to ascertain the extent to which an external representation, rather than a task, might evoke a problem-solving strategy. In addition to familiarity to instructional materials, the main reason for which the students preferred line-angle formulas for nearly all of the task types is that the representational system allowed them most readily extract relevant, or otherwise useful, information without distracting them. However, line-angle formulas did not seem to cue students to the three-dimensional attributes of molecules; only dash-and-wedge structures and Newman and chair conformers did so. For the electron-pushing tasks, the research participants’ reasoning processes included at least some chemical characteristics of the species involved in the transformation when they were not given the product of reaction. When provided with the overall transformation, however, the students changed their focus to getting to the product. Consequently, they replaced correct answers with incorrect ones when given the reaction products. These results raise the possibility that traditional mechanism tasks may mask students’ mechanistic reasoning ability.

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