scholarly journals The tip of the iceberg in organic chemistry classes: how do students deal with the invisible?

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Graulich

Organic chemistry education is one of the youngest research areas among all chemistry related research efforts, and its published scholarly work has become vibrant and diverse over the last 15 years. Research on problem-solving behavior, students' use of the arrow-pushing formalism, the investigation of students' conceptual knowledge and their cognitive skills have shaped our understanding of college students' understanding in organic chemistry classes. This review provides an overview of research efforts focusing on student's perspectives and summarizes the main results and pending questions that may guide subsequent research activities.

Author(s):  
Julia Eckhard ◽  
Marc Rodemer ◽  
Axel Langner ◽  
Sascha Bernholt ◽  
Nicole Graulich

Research in Organic Chemistry education has revealed students’ challenges in mechanistic reasoning. When solving mechanistic tasks, students tend to focus on explicit surface features, apply fragmented conceptual knowledge, rely on rote-memorization and, hence, often struggle to build well-grounded causal explanations. When taking a resource perspective as a lens, students’ difficulties may arise from either an unproductive or a missing activation of cognitive resources. Instructors’ explanations and their guidance in teaching situations could serve as a lynchpin to activate these resources. Compared to students’ challenges in building mechanistic explanations in Organic Chemistry, little is known about instructors’ explanations when solving mechanistic tasks and how they shape their targeted explanations for students in terms of the construction and embedding of cause–effect rationales. This qualitative study aims to contribute to the growing research on mechanistic reasoning by exploring instructors’ explanatory approaches. Therefore, we made use of the framing construct, intended to trigger certain frames with explicit instruction. Ten Organic Chemistry instructors (university professors and lecturers) were asked to solve case comparison tasks while being prompted in two scenarios: an expert frame and a teaching frame. Our analysis shows that there is a shift from instructors’ mechanistic explanations in the expert frame towards more elaborated explanations in the teaching frame. In the teaching frame, contrary to what might be expected, complete cause–effect relationships were not always established and instructors differed in how they shaped their explanations. Additional explanatory elements were identified in both frames and their shift in use is discussed. Comparing approaches between frames sheds light on how instructors communicate mechanistic explanations and allows us to derive implications for teaching Organic Chemistry.


Author(s):  
Rajeshwari M. ◽  
Krishna Prasad K.

The Internet of Things is an interrelated system of computer equipment, digital and mechanical machinery with unique identifiers, capable of transferring and relocating data over the Internet in the absence of human-to-computer involvement or without human-to-human interactions. The entire future of the global technology will swing around the Internet of Things, which is bound to connect a large quantity of SOs- Smart Objects, or articles or entities to transform the physical environment around us to a digital world. The application of IoT involves several domains like smart grids, smart farms, better healthcare, smart cities, smart homes, smart transportation system, smart parking and so on. The problem-solving and conceptual knowledge obtained in school is basically inert for several students. In certain situations, knowledge acquired remains surface bound features of problems, as learned from school classes and textbook presentations. The Cognitive computing process uses the available data to react to changes in order to make the right decisions based on specific learning processes from past experiences. In the case of cognitive apprenticeship process, there is a need to bring deliberately the thinking process and thoughts emerge, to produce them to be visible, whether in the case of writing, reading, or problem solving. The thoughts of the teacher must be completely visible to all the students, while the thinking of students must be clearly visible and readable to the teacher. The mental capabilities of students are developed through the cognitive skills that the students need to learn to be successful in school. To effectively understand, write, read, analyze, remember, think, and solve all the problems, the students of these cognitive skills should gather so as to function collectively and properly. If these skills become weak, the students will start to struggle, unable to face problems and solve them correctly. The new learning method makes the students observe, perform and practice the subjects from both the teachers and their peers. In view of this, this study of literature review investigates and explains the concept of IoT by conducting a systematic review and assessment of corporate and communal white papers, scholarly research articles, journals and papers, professional dialogues and discussions with researchers, academicians, scholars, educational experts along with online database available. Purpose and goal of this paper is to analytically categorize, and examine the prevailing research techniques and applications of IoT approaches on cognitive skills of students towards personalization in education. The limitation of the study is that it deals only with the subject matter's application components which leave physical components.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 394
Author(s):  
Fenghai Guo ◽  
Jayla Young ◽  
Nichele Deese ◽  
Ti’Bran Pickens-Flynn ◽  
Dustin Sellers ◽  
...  

Undergraduate research is well recognized as an effective high-impact educational practice associated with student success in higher education. Actively engaging students in research experiences is considered as one of the several high-impact practices by many agencies including the American Chemical Society. Developing and maintaining an active undergraduate research program benefits both the faculty and students especially those from under-represented minority groups (URM). The infusion of research experiences into undergraduate curriculum enables students from all backgrounds to develop independent critical thinking skills, written and oral communications skills that are very important for successful careers in “STEM” area. Several strategies and activities such as a Peer Mentoring Program (PMP), funded research activities, the infusion of research into organic chemistry labs, undergraduate professional development, research group meetings, presentations at regional/national conferences, and publishing as co-authors on peer-review papers are vital in creating a welcoming research group that promotes the diversity, equity, and inclusion in organic chemistry education. The experiences working on funded research projects, presenting their research data at conferences and publishing papers as co-authors will greatly increase the under-represented minority (URM) students’ chance in landing a job or getting admitted into graduate/professional programs in STEM area.


1957 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline J. Goodnow ◽  
Irvin Rubinstein

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Amina Alobaidi

Background: PBL appears to answer many concerns regarding educational methods, encourages students to look for new solutions to relevant problems using available knowledge and resources. The process expands students' critical thinking and problem solving skills while enhancing their creative capabilities Objective: To develop a PBL modules for teaching of organic chemistry. Methods: This module was developed for implementation in the curriculum of Chemistry Departments in Colleges of Sciences and Education. This is an innovations to be developed for increasing the wide-ranging abilities of students. A series of strategies which are involved in PBL, concept mapping and online communications, are suggested and discussed in terms of encouraging student-centered learning.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 720-730
Author(s):  
Iker Montes-Bageneta ◽  
Urtzi Akesolo ◽  
Sara López ◽  
Maria Merino ◽  
Eneritz Anakabe ◽  
...  

Aims: Computational modelling may help us to detect the more important factors governing this process in order to optimize it. Background: The generation of hazardous organic waste in teaching and research laboratories poses a big problem that universities have to manage. Methods: In this work, we report on the experimental measurement of waste generation on the chemical education laboratories within our department. We measured the waste generated in the teaching laboratories of the Organic Chemistry Department II (UPV/EHU), in the second semester of the 2017/2018 academic year. Likewise, to know the anthropogenic and social factors related to the generation of waste, a questionnaire has been utilized. We focused on all students of Experimentation in Organic Chemistry (EOC) and Organic Chemistry II (OC2) subjects. It helped us to know their prior knowledge about waste, awareness of the problem of separate organic waste and the correct use of the containers. These results, together with the volumetric data, have been analyzed with statistical analysis software. We obtained two Perturbation-Theory Machine Learning (PTML) models including chemical, operational, and academic factors. The dataset analyzed included 6050 cases of laboratory practices vs. practices of reference. Results: These models predict the values of acetone waste with R2 = 0.88 and non-halogenated waste with R2 = 0.91. Conclusion: This work opens a new gate to the implementation of more sustainable techniques and a circular economy with the aim of improving the quality of university education processes.


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