Using Eye Movement Modeling Examples as an Instructional Tool in Organic Chemistry

研究如何提高学生对化学的理解是大学化学教育研究的核心目标。对于大多数学生来说，有机化学仍然是一门非常费力的学科，学生对记忆机制的依赖已经被广泛记录下来。用给定的机制进行合理推理的能力，即在一个机械过程中解释给定的结构，是有机化学的旗舰，同时也是学生的主要障碍之一。学生们经常将有关反应机制的讲座视为“一系列说明性（但通常不相关）案例的呈现”，导致他们在化学上解释结构表征的能力有限（Corey & Cheng, 1989, p. 4; Flynn & Ogilvie, 2015）。来自认知学习科学的证据表明，通过突出表征的相关特征来明确提示相关信息，特别是通过专家的眼动建模，可以促进这一学习过程。帮助学生模仿专家的凝视，并结合口头解释，可能会缩小记录的差距，使学生能够成功地解释结构表征，如机制，并将其与适当的概念知识联系起来。因此，我们的目标是利用这些结果来开发和测试一个教学设置，该设置明确地使用眼动建模示例来向学生传达专家的机械推理过程。

Investigating how to improve students' chemical understanding is a central ambition of educational research in chemistry at the college level. For most students, organic chemistry still represents a very labor-intense subject and students' reliance on memorizing mechanisms has been extensively documented. The ability to reason appropriately with a given mechanism, i.e. interpreting a given structure in a mechanistic process, is the flagship of organic chemistry and at the same time one of the main impediments for students. Students often perceive lectures on reaction mechanisms as a 'presentation of a series of illustrative ([but] generally unrelated) cases', leading to a limited ability to chemically interpret structural representations (Corey & Cheng, 1989, p. 4; Flynn & Ogilvie, 2015). Evidence from cognitive learning sciences show that explicit cueing on relevant information by highlighting relevant features of a representation, especially through an eye movement modeling of an expert, can facilitate this learning process. Helping students to mimic an expert gaze in combination with a verbal explanation might close the documented gap for students to interpret structural representations such as a mechanism successfully and to link it with appropriate conceptual knowledge. Therefore, we aim to draw upon these results to develop and test an instructional setting that explicitly uses eye movement modeling examples to convey the mechanistic reasoning process of an expert to students.