Correction: South African physical sciences teachers’ use of formulae and proportion when answering reaction-based stoichiometry calculation questions

Correction for ‘South African physical sciences teachers’ use of formulae and proportion when answering reaction-based stoichiometry calculation questions’ by Angela Elisabeth Stott, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2021, 22, 443–456, DOI: 10.1039/D0RP00291G.

Visualizing chemistry teachers’ enacted assessment design practices to better understand barriers to “best practices”

Even when chemistry teachers’ beliefs about assessment design align with literature-cited best practices, barriers can prevent teachers from enacting those beliefs when developing day-to-day assessments. In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined. Results from a detailed evaluation of several high school chemistry formative assessments, learning goals, and learning activities reveal that assessment items are often developed to require well-articulated tasks but lack either alignment regarding representational level or employ only one representational level for nearly all assessment items. Implications for the development of a chemistry-specific method for evaluating alignment are presented as well as implications for high school chemistry assessment design.

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

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.

Location-thinking, value-thinking, and graphical forms: combining analytical frameworks to analyze inferences made by students when interpreting the points and trends on a reaction coordinate diagram

Reaction coordinate diagrams (RCDs) are chemical representations widely employed to visualize the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters associated with reactions. Previous research has demonstrated a host of misconceptions students adopt when interpreting the perceived information encoded in RCDs. This qualitative research study explores how general chemistry students interpret points and trends on a RCD and how these interpretations impact their inferences regarding the rate of a chemical reaction. Sixteen students participated in semi-structured interviews in which participants were asked to interpret the points and trends along provided RCDs and to compare relative reaction rates between RCDs. Findings derived from this study demonstrate the diversity of graphical reasoning adopted by students, the impact of students’ interpretations of the x-axis of a RCD on the graphical reasoning employed, and the influence of these ideas on inferences made about reaction rate. Informed by analytical frameworks grounded in the resources framework and the actor-oriented model of transfer, implications for instruction are provided with suggestions for how RCDs may be presented to assist students in recognizing the critical information encoded in these diagrams.

The role of visuospatial thinking in students’ predictions of molecular geometry

Visuospatial thinking is considered crucial for understanding of three-dimensional spatial concepts in STEM disciplines. Despite their importance, little is known about the underlying cognitive processing required to spatially reason and the varied strategies students may employ to solve visuospatial problems. This study seeks to identify and describe how and when students use imagistic or analytical reasoning when making pen-on-paper predictions about molecular geometry and if particular reasoning strategies are linked to greater accuracy of responses. Student reasoning was evidenced through pen-on-paper responses generated by high attaining, high school students (N = 10) studying Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) Theory in their final year of chemistry. Through analysis and coding of students’ open-ended paper-based responses to an introductory task, results revealed that students employed multiple reasoning strategies, including analytical heuristics and the spontaneous construction of external diagrammatic representations to predict molecular geometry. Importantly, it was observed that despite being instructed on the use of VSEPR theory to find analytical solutions, some students exhibited preference for alternative reasoning strategies drawing on prior knowledge and imagistic reasoning; showing greater accuracy with 3D diagrammatic representations than students who used the algorithmic method of instruction. This has implications for both research and practice as use of specific reasoning strategies are not readily promoted as a pedagogical approach nor are they given credit for in national examinations at school level.

The integration of a community service learning water project in a post-secondary chemistry lab

Community Service Learning (CSL) is an experiential learning approach that integrates community service into student projects and provides diverse learning opportunities to reduce interdisciplinary barriers. A semester-long chemistry curriculum with an integrated CSL intervention was implemented in a Canadian university to analyze the potential for engagement and positive attitudes toward chemistry as a meaningful undertaking for 14 post-secondary students in the laboratory as well as for their 400 K-12 student partners in the community. Traditionally, introductory science experiments typically involve repeating a cookbook recipe from a lab book, but this CSL project allowed the post-secondary and K-12 students to work collaboratively to determine the physical and chemical properties and total dissolved solids in the water fountains from the K-12 students' schools. Post-instructional surveys were completed by all learners and were analyzed using a mixed methodological approach with both quantitative and qualitative methods. The expected audience that may be interested in this study are those involved in teaching chemistry in higher education and at the K-12 level as well as those interested in service learning, community and civic engagement, experiential learning, and development of transferable skills in chemistry. The results demonstrate that both groups of students report favorable engagement and attitudes towards learning chemistry and higher self-confidence levels on performing lab skills after the activity. Furthermore, both groups of students expressed interest in exploring future projects, which is indicative of the positive impact of CSL and the mutual benefits of the partnership.

Chemistry instructors’ intentions toward developing, teaching, and assessing student representational competence skills

Representational competence is one's ability to use disciplinary representations for learning, communicating, and problem-solving. These skills are at the heart of engagement in scientific practices and were recognized by the ACS Examinations Institute as one of ten anchoring concepts. Despite the important role that representational competence plays in student success in chemistry and the considerable number of investigations into students’ ability to reason with representations, very few studies have examined chemistry instructors’ approaches toward developing student representational competence. This study interviewed thirteen chemistry instructors from eleven different universities across the US about their intentions to develop, teach, and assess student representational competence skills. We found that most instructors do not aim to help students develop any representational competence skills. At the same time, participants’ descriptions of their instructional and assessment practices revealed that, without realizing it, most are likely to teach and assess several representational competence skills in their courses. A closer examination of these skills revealed a focus on lower-level representational competence skills (e.g., the ability to interpret and generate representations) and a lack of a focus on higher-level meta-representational competence skills (e.g., the ability to describe affordances and limitations of representations). Finally, some instructors reported self-awareness about their lack of knowledge about effective teaching about representations and the majority expressed a desire for professional development opportunities to learn about differences in how experts and novices conceptualize representations, about evidence-based practices for teaching about representations, and about how to assess student mastery of representational competence skills. This study holds clear implications for informing chemistry instructors’ professional development initiatives. Such training needs to help instructors take cognizance of relevant theories of learning (e.g., constructivism, dual-coding theory, information processing model, Johnstone's triangle), and the key factors affecting students’ ability to reason with representations, as well as foster awareness of representational competence skills and how to support students in learning with representations.

Development and validation of an instrument for measuring Chinese chemistry teachers’ perceptions of pedagogical content knowledge for teaching chemistry core competencies

This study aims to develop and validate a new instrument for measuring chemistry teachers’ perceptions of Pedagogical Content Knowledge for teaching Chemistry Core Competencies (PCK_CCC) in the context of new Chinese chemistry curriculum reform. The five constructs and the initial 17 items in the new instrument were contextualized by the PCK pentagon model (Park S. and Oliver J. S., (2008), J. Res. Sci. Teach., 45(7), 812–834.) with the notions of the Senior High School Chemistry Curriculum Standards (Ministry of Education, P. R. China, 2017). 210 chemistry teachers from a University-Government-School initiative voluntarily participated in this study. The findings from item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis provide sufficient empirical evidence to support the convergent and discriminant validity of the instrument. The concurrent validity of the instrument was confirmed by testing mean differences among teacher demographic groups. The high Cronbach's coefficient alpha values show good internal consistency reliability of the instrument. Integrating the evidence from theory and data, we documented a valid and reliable PCK_CCC instrument with five constructs consisting of 16 items. This study provides a thorough process for developing and validating instruments that address teacher perceptions of their PCK in a particular subject domain. The valid and reliable PCK_CCC instrument would be beneficial for teacher education researchers and teacher professional programs.

Making sense of sensemaking: using the sensemaking epistemic game to investigate student discourse during a collaborative gas law activity

Beyond students’ ability to manipulate variables and solve problems, chemistry instructors are also interested in students developing a deeper conceptual understanding of chemistry, that is, engaging in the process of sensemaking. The concept of sensemaking transcends problem-solving and focuses on students recognizing a gap in knowledge and working to construct an explanation that resolves this gap, leading them to “make sense” of a concept. Here, we focus on adapting and applying sensemaking as a framework to analyze three groups of students working through a collaborative gas law activity. The activity was designed around the learning cycle to aid students in constructing the ideal gas law using an interactive simulation. For this analysis, we characterized student discourse using the structural components of the sensemaking epistemic game using a deductive coding scheme. Next, we further analyzed students’ epistemic form by assessing features of the activity and student discourse related to sensemaking: whether the question was framed in a real-world context, the extent of student engagement in robust explanation building, and analysis of written scientific explanations. Our work provides further insight regarding the application and use of the sensemaking framework for analyzing students’ problem solving by providing a framework for inferring the depth with which students engage in the process of sensemaking.