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

有机化学是大学生最难的科目之一;不仅因为大量的事实知识，而且因为有机化学中的推理主要是由多概念思维方式驱动的。分子转化或化合物反应性的描述涉及不同化学概念、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反应或明确定义给定问题的机械步骤的能力。尽管对问题解决的研究已经非常广泛，但我们对学生运用化学概念进行推理的研究还不够深入。一个清晰的概念推理能力的图像将有助于我们提高有机化学学习更具体的学习者。建议CESTs项目解决这一需要，通过使用概念引出排序任务的定性访谈研究，以表征的概念分类，并进一步定义相应的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.