An online categorization task to investigate changes in students' interpretations of organic chemistry reactions

Abstract

In this study, we investigated how students organized their knowledge about organic chemistry reactions in a transformed curriculum, including their choices, abilities, and changes over time. This transformed curriculum focuses on

Investigating the role of multiple categorization tasks in a curriculum designed around mechanistic patterns and principles

“…The present study builds on previous research conducted by our group that investigated the differences between novices and experts in organic chemistry using a categorization task with organic chemistry reactions on cards in an interview setting (Galloway et al, 2018(Galloway et al, , 2019Lapierre and Flynn, 2020). That work identified four main ways in which organic chemistry reactions were categorized (Fig.…”

“…In the open sort, the names that participants provided as well as the explanations of the categories were used to assign one of four levels of interpretation (Fig. 3) using the previously established coding (Galloway et al, 2019;Lapierre and Flynn, 2020). These four levels of interpretations reflect increasing levels of expertise with respect to the features of a reaction that a participant identified as being meaningful.…”

“…The ability to create meaningful patterns in a domain has long been attributed as a key feature of expertise, where an expert will often notice deep features that novices will overlook (Bransford et al, 2010). Previous work evaluating the ''Patterns of Mechanism'' curriculum implemented an online categorization task to evaluate changes in expertise with respect to how students choose to see connections between reactions as well as their ability to see the underlying mechanistic patterns (Lapierre and Flynn, 2020). That work illustrated a potential lack of alignment between the expertise demonstrated in how a participant chooses to sort and their ability when cued, proposing the question of what relationship, if any, exists between various sorting contexts.…”

Examining Course-Level Conceptual Connections Using a Card Sort Task: A Case Study in a First-Year, Interdisciplinary, Earth Science Laboratory Course

“…Typically, participants are given a series of cards to sort based on the underlying principle or similarities of solution (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser 1981, 124). The sorting itself may be done in person through one-on-one interviews (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser 1981), as an in-class activity (Smith et al 2013, 630), or through an online platform (Lapierre and Flynn 2020), with no clear bias observed between physical or virtual sorting (Bussolon, Russi, and Missier 2006). It is often specified that participants are not to solve the problems, just to sort them, with emphasis that this is not a test and there is no incorrect way to sort them.…”

“…Across disciplines, the majority of studies have looked at some combination of undergraduate students as novices and graduate students or faculty as the experts. Many disciplines have multiple studies with varying participants and timelines: in physics, where the applicability of the card sort tool was introduced looking at undergraduate students compared to graduate students (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser 1981); in math, comparing first-and second-year undergraduate students (Fernandez-Plaza and Simpson 2016); in biology, studies have looked at biology faculty against non-biology majors (Smith et al 2013), non-majors, early and advanced majors, graduate students and faculty to look at the transition over a career (Bissonnette et al 2017), and tracking changes in undergraduates over a single semester (Hoskinson et al 2017); similarly in chemistry, studies have looked at chemistry undergraduates against faculty (Krieter et al 2016), as well as a comparison of students with no chemistry background, high school students, general chemistry undergraduates, upper-level chemistry undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty (Irby et al 2016), and tracking changes in undergraduates over a single-semester, (Lapierre and Flynn 2020) and two-semester organic chemistry course (Galloway, Leung, and Flynn 2019). In general, these studies find that the card sorting activity is a suitable tool for investigating whether a participant displays more novice-like or expert-like thinking in their respective field.…”