Organic chemistry students’ usage of electrostatic potential maps across an unstructured and structured card sort

Abstract

Electrostatic potential maps (EPM) have the potential to support organic chemistry students in seeing reaction mechanisms through the perspective of electrostatic attraction. Prior to any pedagogical changes, foundational knowledge on how students use EPMs in particular contexts would be needed to inform how to integrate EPMs into instruction. This study describes an exploration into how organic chemistry students use EPMs during two card sort tasks. Seventeen undergraduate organic chemistry students participated in an interview that included an open and closed card sort. The interviews were inductively coded to identify students’ usage of EPMs, and usage change based on the open sort compared to the closed sort. Viewed from a resources framework, this study demonstrated how students’ use of EPMs shifted depending on the task structure. Variations were observed both among students and within students between tasks in terms of whether EPMs were utilized and when utilized whether information from EPMs were used in isolation or integrated with other chemistry concepts. The results of this study imply that more formal integration of EPMs into instruction and assessment would be needed for students who did not use EPMs. Instruction that models and assesses translation of representations may begin activating a more integrated perspective of EPMs which could be productive for students who had an isolated use of EPMs. The introduction of EPMs independent of specific chemistry tasks (e.g. during a general introduction of molecular representations) could lead some students to focus only on explicit features of the EPM representation and not tie features of the representation to their existing chemical knowledge.