Collaborative Research: An Exploration of the Impact of Molecular Representations on Organic Chemistry Students’ Problem Solving

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This project aims to serve the national interest by better understanding how college students learn about, interpret, and use representations of molecules to solve organic chemistry problems. Chemists rely on representations to describe, communicate about, and understand the behavior of particles that are far too small to be seen. Examples of representations include chemical formulas and graphical representations that use lines and symbols to show how atoms are arranged. College students enrolled in organic chemistry courses must learn to interpret and use such representations at the same time they are learning about complex chemical processes. This NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) project will generate new knowledge about how organic chemistry students learn to interpret a variety of representations and use them to solve problems. The project team will use the results of this research to develop and evaluate instructional modules to better support organic chemistry students’ learning and problem solving.This IUSE: EHR project intends to systematically investigate the effects of different molecular representations on students’ success in solving organic chemistry problems. The representation types that will be explored include chemical formulae, line angle formulae, ball and stick figures, and electrostatic potential maps. The work will be guided by an Abstraction Framework, the Multimedia Learning Theory on Learning with Textual and Visual Representations, and the Actor-Oriented Transfer Framework to facilitate understanding of how students extract encoded information from each representation, make connections to prior instances, and extrapolate that knowledge for use in new problem contexts. The project team plans to use a mixed method approach across three studies conducted at the University of Northern Colorado and the University of South Florida. First, to identify which representations best facilitate student success in solving a variety of organic chemistry problem types, end-of-semester students will be randomly assigned to one of four problem sets that differ only in the representations provided and the results will be analyzed. Next, student problem-solving sessions using think-aloud protocols will be conducted to generate hypotheses regarding how particular representations facilitate student success. The foci of these analyses will be on how the different representations support student abstraction and transfer from one problem context to another. Finally, the hypotheses generated from these studies will be used to develop and evaluate an instructional intervention that will include the development of instructional materials and online modules. The intervention will be evaluated with respect to its impact on student learning, which will also serve as a measure for the utility of the hypothesized relationships. The materials developed will be disseminated and made freely available to faculty teaching organic chemistry. The research results will be presented at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. To broaden the impact even further, the project team intends to conduct four workshops involving a total of forty faculty members who teach organic chemistry. During the workshops, the team will assist the faculty members in integrating project materials and findings into organic chemistry instruction at their institutions. NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.