ChemSense: Investigating Learning and the Impact of Sustained Integration of Representational Tools and Chemical Investigations in the Classroom

Sri International, Menlo Park CA

Investigators

Abstract

A multidisciplinary program of research and development that examines the impact of the sustained integration of representational tools and chemical investigations on chemistry learning and teaching in high schools and colleges will be undertaken. A team of chemists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and science educators will focus on three critical and interrelated issues: chemical understanding, scientific investigations, and discourse and representation. The project will generate new knowledge about the relationship between students' understanding of chemical phenomena and their generation and use of various representations at the macroscopic (physical, aggregate) and microscopic (atomic and molecular) levels and in the context of collaborative laboratory investigations. Additionally it will evolve new knowledge about the relationship between teacher activities, scaffolding, and support and students' use of representations in collaborative laboratory investigations. It is planned to extend the development of a learning environment, the ChemSense Knowledge Building Environment that both supports and benefits from research activities. This environment allows students and teachers/professors to collaborate in the sustained investigation of chemical phenomena, collect data, build representations of these phenomena, and participate in scaffolded discourse to explain these phenomena in terms of underlying chemical entities and mechanisms. The project team will work with chemistry professors and high school chemistry teachers to implement this environment for an entire semester in a range of college and high school chemistry courses. These activities and assessments will be designed around key dimensions associated with the particulate nature of matter and chemical reactions: change in molecular geometry, connectivity, aggregation, state, and concentration. In high school classrooms, these dimensions will be employed within fairly standard first-year high school chemistry topics: electronegativity and bond formation, solubility, gas laws, and chemical reactions. Undergraduate studies will focus on integration of ChemSense into two types of classroom situations: a first-year lecture course designed to convey general chemical principles through organic chemistry, and a first-year, integrated "studio" course that combines lecture and wet-lab experiences. With appropriate laboratory activities and teacher guidance, the extended use of student generated, static and dynamic representations of chemical processes, along with instrument generated representations of their investigations, should result in deeper discourse and understanding that connect physical phenomena with underlying chemical entities and mechanisms.