Assessing the conceptual categorization ability in organic chemistry through Concept-Eliciting Sorting Tasks (CESTs)

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Organic chemistry ranks among the hardest subjects for college students; not only because of the large amount of factual knowledge, but also because reasoning in organic chemistry is mainly driven by a multi-conceptual way of thinking. The description of a molecular transformation or the reactivity of a compound involves the application of different chemical concepts, principles, theories and various conditional variables. One key competence for successful problem solving in organic chemistry is the ability to identify and classify important reactions or mechanistic steps for clearly defining a given problem. Despite the extensive research in problem solving, we still do not know enough about students reasoning with chemical concepts. A clear defined picture of the conceptual reasoning ability would help us to improve learning in organic chemistry more learner-specific. The proposed CESTs project addresses this need by using concept-eliciting sorting tasks in a qualitative interview study in order to characterize the conceptual categorization and, further, to define the partial abilities of a corresponding competence model.