Tell Me Why: Raising Student Teachers’ Awareness for Elaborate Mechanistic Explanations in Organic Chemistry

Explaining is a core competence of teachers to support students’ meaningful learning of chemical phenomena. In Organic Chemistry, this involves understanding the processes and reasons underlying reactions by linking structural, electronic, and energetic considerations. However, research has shown that teacher explanations do not automatically include these important mechanistic aspects. Less sophisticated explanations in Organic Chemistry courses can implicitly convey to learners that vague explanations are sufficient, which student teachers might transfer to their future everyday chemistry teaching at high schools. To support student teachers’ awareness of key characteristics underlying elaborate explanations in Organic Chemistry, we developed an activity embedded in a student teacher course. By using purposefully chosen contrasting explanations, the student teachers inductively discovered criteria for mechanistic explanations that supported an understanding of the underlying reactions before critically examining their peers’ explanations of different reactions. The qualitative evaluation of the activity revealed that student teachers’ (N = 9) explanations became more sophisticated and that their perception of what constitutes an elaborate explanation changed.