Correlational analysis of conceptual understanding, chemical representation, and representational competence on chemistry equilibrium

Explicit versus implicit similarity – exploring relational conceptual understanding in organic chemistry

Chemistry Education Research and Practice ◽

10.1039/c9rp00054b ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (4) ◽

pp. 924-936 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Nicole Graulich ◽

Sebastian Hedtrich ◽

René Harzenetter

Keyword(s):

Organic Chemistry ◽

Undergraduate Students ◽

Conceptual Understanding ◽

Specific Information ◽

Substitution Reactions ◽

Representational Competence ◽

Future Directions ◽

Large Molecules ◽

Domain Specific ◽

Research And Teaching

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information. Various studies that focused on representational competence have already investigated how learners relate a representation to its corresponding concept. However, aside from a basic connectional representational understanding, the ability to infer a comparable reactivity from multiple different functional groups in large molecules is important for undergraduate students in organic chemistry. In this quantitative study, we aimed at exploring how to assess undergraduate students’ ability to distinguish between conceptually relevant similarities and distracting surface similarities among representations. The instrument consisted of multiple-choice items in four concept categories that are generally used to estimate the reactivity in substitution reactions. This exploratory study shows that the item design for assessing students’ conceptual understanding influences students’ answering patterns. Insights and pitfalls gained from this investigation and future directions for research and teaching are provided.

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Self-Report Imagery Questionnaire Scores and Subtypes of Social-Desirable Responding

Journal of Individual Differences ◽

10.1027/1614-0001.29.4.181 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 181-188 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

John Allbutt ◽

Jonathan Ling ◽

Thomas M. Heffernan ◽

Mohammed Shafiullah

Keyword(s):

Visual Imagery ◽

Correlational Analysis ◽

Self Report ◽

Auditory Imagery ◽

Auditory Modality ◽

Visual Thinking ◽

Thinking Style ◽

Social Desirable Responding

Allbutt, Ling, and Shafiullah (2006) and Allbutt, Shafiullah, and Ling (2006) found that scores on self-report measures of visual imagery experience correlate primarily with the egoistic form of social-desirable responding. Here, three studies are reported which investigated whether this pattern of findings generalized to the ratings of imagery vividness in the auditory modality, a new version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire ( Marks, 1995 ), and reports of visual thinking style. The measure of social-desirable responding used was the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 2002 ). Correlational analysis replicated the pattern seen in our earlier work and of the correlations with the egoistic bias, the correlation with vividness of visual imagery was largest and significant, the correlation with visual thinking style next largest and approached significance, and the correlation with vividness of auditory imagery was the smallest and not significant. The size of these correlations mirrored the extent to which the three aspects of imagery were valued by participants.

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