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

有机化学是大学生最难学的科目之一，这不仅是因为大量的事实知识，还因为有机化学中的推理主要是由一种多概念的思维方式驱动的。对化合物的分子转化或反应活性的描述涉及到不同的化学概念、原理、理论和各种条件变量的应用。在有机化学中成功解决问题的一个关键能力是识别和分类重要的反应或明确定义给定问题的机械步骤的能力。尽管在问题解决方面有了广泛的研究，但我们对学生用化学概念进行推理的了解还不够。一个明确的概念推理能力的图景将有助于我们提高有机化学的学习效果，使之更具学习者针对性。拟议的CESTs项目通过在定性访谈研究中使用概念引出分类任务来满足这一需要，以便表征概念分类，并进一步定义相应能力模型的部分能力。

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.