The role of authentic contexts and social elements in supporting organic chemistry students’ interactions with writing-to-learn assignments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Petterson ◽  
Solaire A. Finkenstaedt-Quinn ◽  
Anne Ruggles Gere ◽  
Ginger V. Shultz
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Peer Interactions ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Writing To Learn ◽  
Student Interest ◽  
Student Interactions ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Student Affect ◽  
Survey Responses

Student affect is an important factor in the learning process and may be especially important in gateway courses such as organic chemistry. Students’ recognition of the relevance of the content they are learning and interactions with their peers can support their motivation to learn. Herein, we describe a study focused on how Writing-to-Learn assignments situate organic chemistry content within relevant contexts and incorporate social elements to support positive student interactions with organic chemistry. These assignments incorporate rhetorical elements—an authentic context, role, genre, and audience—to support student interest and demonstrate the relevance of the content. In addition, students engage in the processes of peer review and revision to support their learning. We identified how the authentic contexts and peer interactions incorporated into two Writing-to-Learn assignments supported students’ interactions with the assignments and course content by analyzing student interviews and supported by feedback survey responses. Our results indicate that assignments incorporating these elements can support student affect and result in students’ perceived learning, but that there should be careful consideration of the relevance of the chosen contexts with respect to the interests of the students enrolled in the course and the complexity of the contexts.

Students’ meaningful learning experiences from participating in organic chemistry writing-to-learn activities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trisha Gupte ◽  
Field M. Watts ◽  
Jennifer A. Schmidt-McCormack ◽  
Ina Zaimi ◽  
Anne Ruggles Gere ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Learning Experiences ◽  
Meaningful Learning ◽  
Writing To Learn ◽  
Chemistry Laboratory ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Survey Analysis ◽  
Problem Solving Skills

Teaching organic chemistry requires supporting learning strategies that meaningfully engage students with the challenging concepts and advanced problem-solving skills needed to be successful. Such meaningful learning experiences should encourage students to actively choose to incorporate new concepts into their existing knowledge frameworks by appealing to the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning. This study provides a qualitative analysis of students’ meaningful learning experiences after completing three Writing-to-Learn (WTL) assignments in an organic chemistry laboratory course. The assignments were designed to appeal to the three domains necessary for a meaningful learning experience, and this research seeks to understand if and how the WTL assignments promoted students’ meaningful learning. The primary data collected were the students’ responses to open-ended feedback surveys conducted after each assignment. These responses were qualitatively analyzed to identify themes across students’ experiences about their meaningful learning. The feedback survey analysis was triangulated with interviews conducted after each assignment. The results identify how the assignments connected to students’ existing knowledge from other courses and indicate that assignment components such as authentic contexts, clear expectations, and peer review supported students’ meaningful learning experiences. These results inform how assignment design can influence students’ learning experiences and suggest implications for how to support students’ meaningful learning of organic chemistry through writing.

scholarly journals Writing to learn and learning to write across the disciplines: Peer-to-peer writing in introductory-level MOOCs

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise K. Comer ◽  
Charlotte R. Clark ◽  
Dorian A. Canelas
Keyword(s):  
Online Courses ◽  
Peer Interactions ◽  
Peer Assessment ◽  
Peer To Peer ◽  
Writing To Learn ◽  
Massive Open Online Courses ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Composition I ◽  
English Composition I

<p>This study aimed to evaluate how peer-to-peer interactions through writing impact student learning in introductory-level massive open online courses (MOOCs) across disciplines. This article presents the results of a qualitative coding analysis of peer-to-peer interactions in two introductory level MOOCs: English Composition I: Achieving Expertise and Introduction to Chemistry. Results indicate that peer-to-peer interactions in writing through the forums and through peer assessment enhance learner understanding, link to course learning objectives, and generally contribute positively to the learning environment. Moreover, because forum interactions and peer review occur in written form, our research contributes to open distance learning (ODL) scholarship by highlighting the importance of writing to learn as a significant pedagogical practice that should be encouraged more in MOOCs across disciplines.</p>

Organic chemistry students’ challenges with coherence formation between reactions and reaction coordinate diagrams

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 732-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maia Popova ◽  
Stacey Lowery Bretz
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Reaction Mechanisms ◽  
Reaction Coordinate ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Student Difficulties ◽  
Need Support ◽  
Elimination Reactions

The purpose of this study was to elucidate and describe students’ thinking when making connections between substitution and elimination reactions and their corresponding reaction coordinate diagrams. Thirty-six students enrolled in organic chemistry II participated in individual, semi-structured interviews. Three major themes were identified that characterize students’ difficulties with integrating the information from the reactions and the reaction coordinate diagrams: incorrect ideas about the meanings of the reaction coordinate diagrams’ features, errors when examining reaction mechanisms, and an inability to assess the relative energies of reaction species. These findings suggest that students need support for coherence formation between reactions and reaction coordinate diagrams. Implications for teaching to address these student difficulties are suggested.

TMI (Too much information)! Effects of given information on organic chemistry students’ approaches to solving mechanism tasks

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria DeCocq ◽  
Gautam Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
External Representation ◽  
Reaction Products ◽  
Representational System ◽  
Chemistry Students ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Line Angle ◽  
Problem Solving Strategy

We report our qualitative study of twenty-four students enrolled in the second-semester of a second-year undergraduate (sophomore-level) organic chemistry course, Organic Two. We asked the research participants to propose the product and electron-pushing mechanism of elementary mechanistic steps in the absence and presence of the corresponding overall transformation. We also asked the students about their preferences of representational systems when working on tasks common to Organic Two to ascertain the extent to which an external representation, rather than a task, might evoke a problem-solving strategy. In addition to familiarity to instructional materials, the main reason for which the students preferred line-angle formulas for nearly all of the task types is that the representational system allowed them most readily extract relevant, or otherwise useful, information without distracting them. However, line-angle formulas did not seem to cue students to the three-dimensional attributes of molecules; only dash-and-wedge structures and Newman and chair conformers did so. For the electron-pushing tasks, the research participants’ reasoning processes included at least some chemical characteristics of the species involved in the transformation when they were not given the product of reaction. When provided with the overall transformation, however, the students changed their focus to getting to the product. Consequently, they replaced correct answers with incorrect ones when given the reaction products. These results raise the possibility that traditional mechanism tasks may mask students’ mechanistic reasoning ability.

Quantifying the Mismatch Between Course Content and Students’ Dialogue in Online Learning Environments

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunghoon Lim ◽  
Conrad S. Tucker ◽  
Kathryn Jablokow ◽  
Bart Pursel
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
Classroom Environment ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Discussion Forums ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Student Interactions ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Potential Success ◽  
Learning Platforms

Due to the internet’s increasing global availability, online learning has become a new paradigm for distance learning in higher education. While student interactions and reactions are readily observable in a physical classroom environment, monitoring student interactions and quantifying divergence between lecture topics and the topics that interest students are challenging in online learning platforms. Understanding the effects of this divergence is important for monitoring student engagement and aiding instructors, who are focused on improving the quality of their online courses. The authors of this paper propose a topic modeling method, based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), that quantifies the effects of divergence between course topics (mined from textual transcriptions) and student-discussed topics (mined from discussion forums). Correlations between the measured dissimilarities and (a) the number of posts and comments in discussion forums, (b) the number of submitted assignments, and (c) students’ average performance scores are presented. A case study involving video lecture transcripts and discussion forum posts/comments in a massive open online course (MOOC) platform demonstrates the proposed method’s potential success and informs course providers about the challenges of measuring the topics that interest students.

The flipped classroom for teaching organic chemistry in small classes: is it effective?

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Fautch
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Flipped Classroom ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Class Time ◽  
Small College ◽  
Summative Assessments ◽  
Video Lectures ◽  
The Subject

The flipped classroom is a pedagogical approach that moves course content from the classroom to homework, and uses class time for engaging activities and instructor-guided problem solving. The course content in a sophomore level Organic Chemistry I course was assigned as homework using video lectures, followed by a short online quiz. In class, students' misconceptions were addressed, the concepts from the video lectures were applied to problems, and students were challenged to think beyond given examples. Students showed increased comprehension of the material and appeared to improve their performance on summative assessments (exams). Students reported feeling more comfortable with the subject of organic chemistry, and became noticeably passionate about the subject. In addition to being an effective tool for teaching Organic Chemistry I at a small college, flipping the organic chemistry classroom may help students take more ownership of their learning.

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