TextRev: A Window into How General and Organic Chemistry Students Use Textbook Resources

2003 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley D. Smith ◽  
Dennis C. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
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.

Engaging Organic Chemistry Students Using ChemDraw for iPad

2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (8) ◽  
pp. 1402-1405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Layne A. Morsch ◽  
Michael Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Chemistry Students

The Dienone?Phenol Rearrangement of Santonin: A Comprehensive Laboratory Experiment for Advanced Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Students

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 350-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria I. Colombo ◽  
Sebasti�n A. Testero ◽  
Silvina C. Pellegrinet ◽  
Mar�a L. Bohn ◽  
Edmundo A. R�veda
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Laboratory Experiment ◽  
Chemistry Students

scholarly journals Effect of Cooperative Learning on Chemistry Students’ Achievement in Rwandan Day-upper Secondary Schools

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 2079-2088
Author(s):  
Aimable Sibomana ◽  
Claude Karegeya ◽  
John Sentongo
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Cooperative Learning ◽  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Conventional Teaching ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
Quasi Experimental

<p style="text-align: justify;">The cooperative learning (CL) is an advanced instructional approach that uses different motivational procedures to make instruction significant and learners more responsible. This study aimed to investigate the effects of cooperative learning on students' achievement in chemistry among the advanced level in 12-year basic education schools; it engaged a quasi-experimental design with one treatment group and a comparison group (control); the first applied cooperative learning in teaching organic chemistry while in the control group, organic chemistry was taught by the conventional teaching methods (CTM). A sample of 257 students participated in the study. The data collected used an organic Chemistry Achievement Test, and its data were analyzed using SPSS version 23.0 and MS Excel 2016. The ANCOVA results showed that learners taught using cooperative learning achieved better than their counterparts in the control group (F=78.07, df=1, 256, p<.001) with the learning gains of 16.0% in traditional methods and 53.6% of cooperative learning approach, respectively. However, there was no statistically significant difference in gender of students. It is recommended that chemistry teachers be trained on cooperative learning and encouraged to apply it in their teaching methods to enhance students' academic achievement.</p>

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