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

Abstract

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.

Considering alternative reaction mechanisms: students’ use of multiple representations to reason about mechanisms for a writing-to-learn assignment

“…Both representations provide different information about reactions that reflect organic chemists' conceptions of chemical transformations (Goodwin, 2012). As such, the learning goals for teaching these representations are for students to understand (1) how the representations align with chemical ideas or concepts and (2) how the representations can be used to construct claims, predictions, or explanations (Kozma et al, 2000;Kozma and Russell, 2005;Popova and Jones, 2021).…”

“…Because of this, it is important to investigate how students use multiple representations when supporting claims or making predictions in organic chemistry. Furthermore, it is necessary to extend the existing research literature investigating students' representational competence so instructors can better inform their practice of teaching, eliciting, and assessing representational competence in the classroom (Popova and Jones, 2021).…”

“…This study also provides a WTL assignment that engaged students with developing their representational competence, specifically with the ability to select the appropriate representation when completing a specific task. Activities which engage students in this type of task are especially important, as this is a component of representational competence that may not often be emphasized in introductory organic chemistry (Popova and Jones, 2021). The results of the analysis of students' responses to this assignment suggest that teaching should specifically target the different uses for different representations, in alignment with the representational competence framework and calls to teach the epistemic practices surrounding developing and using models (Kozma and Russell, 2005;NGSS Lead States, 2013;Passmore et al, 2014Passmore et al, , 2016Gouvea and Passmore, 2017).…”

Connecting explanations to representations: benefits of highlighting techniques in tutorial videos on students’ learning in organic chemistry

“…The findings call for quality assurance in instructional formats and attention guidance appropriate to the provided content. Still, it needs to be investigated how tutorial videos of this kind could be included into existing organic chemistry courses or seminars, as there is a reported need for specific instructional material (Popova & Jones, 2021). Furthermore, it remains to be systematically observed if highlighting techniques should be provided for all new contents in a lecture or if they might turn into a distractor when advanced learners already possess a certain degree of visual understanding.…”

“…However, according to the representation dilemma, representations pose a twofold demand: on the one hand, students need to learn new information from representations, on the other hand, they might not yet fully understand the representations themselves (Rau, 2017). This dilemma might be exacerbated from the circumstance that representations are often taught as a mere 'by-product' of other topics and are therefore not explicitly discussed (Hilton & Nichols, 2011;Popova & Jones, 2021;Taskin & Bernholt, 2014). Therefore, it might not be surprising that dealing with representations is considered a major challenge for students (Taber, 2009;Taskin & Bernholt, 2014).…”