Meaningful Contrasts - Investigating the Potential of Scaffolded Contrasting Cases to Promote Students’ Mechanistic Reasoning in Organic Chemistry

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In the last decade, it has largely been recognized that there is a big discrepancy between what is expected of students in organic chemistry at the tertiary level and what students actually show. Students’ surface focus when dealing with organic reaction mechanisms hinders the appropriate interpretation of different organic chemical representations and the use of chemical concepts. Studies show that successful mechanistic reasoning depends on the learner's ability to link structural features to the underlying implicit properties and to approach change of a reaction in a process-, instead of a product-oriented manner. We could show in previous studies that comparative mechanistic reasoning follows a basic reasoning structure that can be used to guide students in solving purposefully designed contrasting cases.However, scaffolding students’ explanations when solving contrasting cases as a potential mean to enhance mechanistic reasoning abilities in organic chemistry have not yet been under investigation quantitatively. In order to close the documented need, we aim at characterizing 1.) the effect of the task format, i.e. contrasting cases compared to traditional single cases, and 2.) the effect on an explicit scaffold on students’ mechanistic reasoning. The insight gained in this study provides valuable implications on how to support students in reasoning about reaction processes in organic chemistry.