Reaction mechanisms commonly used in organic chemistry are a great challenge for students in terms of understanding the representation and inferring the appropriate chemical concepts. In order to support the process of identifying and selecting chemical concepts, purposefully designed case comparisons are widely used. While these tasks place great demands on students' problem-solving capabilities, it is unknown how learners distribute their attention on the complex and information-rich representations. Understanding students' visual decoding behavior when dealing with case comparisons could provide valuable insights into supporting students' problemsolving process. In this exploratory study, we employed eye-tracking methodology to observe beginner and advanced undergraduate chemistry students when working through case-comparison tasks. By establishing a novel eye-tracking measure, the fixation/transition ratio, distinct viewing behaviors could be observed. Results indicate significant differences between both status groups. Advanced students are overall faster in their decision-making and transition more frequently between the representations, indicating a higher selectivity for chemically relevant entities. Further, the results show a significant impact of the visual complexity of a representation on students' visual behavior. Implications for designing case comparisons and supporting students' decoding process are discussed.
Research in science education agrees that one of the key challenges of learners in the discipline is certainly connecting domain-specific representations to the underlying concepts. One way of supporting students to make applicable connections is using purposefully designed highlighting techniques in multimedia instructions. In order to examine the influence of different highlighting techniques on learning, 171 chemistry undergraduate students were provided with tutorial videos either with static, dynamic or without highlighting. The results show that students viewing tutorial videos with dynamic highlighting gave more sophisticated answers in direct retention tasks. Furthermore, results indicate that low prior knowledge is compensated by both static and dynamic highlighting techniques. This finding is supported by causal mediation analysis, which indicates that the effect of prior knowledge is moderated by the different highlighting techniques. Besides student learning outcomes, students' evaluation of the different tutorial videos shows significant benefits of the highlighted instructions in terms of perceiving higher comprehensibility. The results support the use of appropriate highlighting techniques in instructional formats to foster a stronger link between conceptual knowledge and representations.
Supporting students in building well-grounded explanations plays a crucial role in scientific practice. Research in organic chemistry education on students’ mechanistic explanations, however, has revealed various challenges. When solving mechanistic tasks, students experience difficulties when (I) deriving implicit properties from structural formulas, (II) inferring the influence of these properties on the reaction process, (III) comparing and weighing multiple variables, (IV) using structural properties to make a claim, and (V) linking a structural consideration to energetic considerations. Reasoning steps, namely, (I) and (II), can be considered essential for mechanistic explanations, whereas the other steps depend on the task format. One way of supporting learners in these reasoning steps is to provide an instructional explanation that in a guided manner models these steps in tutorial videos. In this study, the design of tutorial videos on substitution reactions, which addresses known students’ challenges, is reported. The tutorial videos were put to test in a qualitative pre/post-interview study with students of an undergraduate organic chemistry course (N = 12). While tutorial videos are widely used, little is known about the impact of explicitly designed instructional explanations in videos on students’ ability to build mechanistic explanations. Hence, the findings of this study aim to contribute to the growing area of mechanistic reasoning by analyzing how students alter their mechanistic explanations after watching explicitly designed tutorial videos. Differentiated content analysis reveals that students adapt different aspects outlined in the tutorial videos. Overall, students infer more structural properties and use these to make a claim after watching the videos. However, linking this claim to the energetics of a reaction seems to remain challenging. Recommendations for the use in teaching as well as further development possibilities of the videos are presented.
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...
In this eye-tracking experiment, we compared instructional videos with static signals, dynamic signals and no signaling in a within-subject design. We tracked eye movements from 28 undergraduate chemistry students while they were watching instructional videos about reaction mechanisms in the different signaling conditions. Further, we assessed students' cognitive load, as well as retention performance. We employed a Latin square design to control for sequencing and content effects of the instructional videos. Our data showed that dynamic signals helped students to better focus their attention to the relevant features of the representations virtually across the entire time of the video presentation. Furthermore, dynamic signals increased retention performance while they decreased extraneous cognitive load. Overall, our findings show the crucial role of pairing the signaling principle with the temporal contiguity principle in instructional videos to help students navigate through complex symbolic representations and improve their learning success.
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