Building reasonable scientific arguments is a fundamental skill students need to participate in scientific discussions. In organic chemistry, students' argumentation and reasoning skills on reaction mechanisms are described as indicators of success. However, students often experience challenges with how to structure their arguments, use scientific…

More than ever, there is an increasing need for digital experimental learning environments in chemistry. The variety of digital learning approaches provided to students range from simple videos showing experiments to highly interactive virtual laboratories. Regardless of which approach is chosen, a digital learning environment should be adapted to…

Acquiring a basic understanding about the composition of crystal structures and the resulting structure-property relationship is central for chemists and material chemists, enabling the prediction of desired properties and the solution of a wide range of current challenges in sciences, e.g., the development of clean-energy storage. For a deeper…

Reaction mechanisms are a core component of organic chemistry. Being able to handle these mechanisms is a central skill for students in this discipline. Diagnosing and fostering mechanistic reasoning is hence an important branch of chemistry education research. When it comes to reasoning about mechanisms, students often experience difficulties…

Chemists refer to chemical phenomena on different representational levels--macroscopic, symbolic, and submicroscopic--which are directly related and connected to each other. Especially in the laboratory, students have to reason about various mechanistic features at the submicroscopic level and connect them in a meaningful way to make sense of the…

The complexity of the world's current grand challenges demands interdisciplinary approaches. The education of future scientists must cross the silos of the traditional disciplines; however, there is still a strong reluctance to tear such walls down. Here, we describe an integrative chemical biology course focused on epigenetics that strives to…

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 rote-memorization and, hence, often struggle to build well-grounded causal explanations. When taking a resource…

The need to develop clean-energy storage systems, harvesting technologies, and new functional materials are but a few of the many contemporary challenges in the domain of science today. To address these challenges, problem solving has become a key skill of the 21st century. It is generally documented, however, that experts and students differ in…

Understanding ongoing chemical processes in the laboratory requires constant shifting between different representational levels--the macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels--and analysis of the various mechanistic features of each of these levels. Thus, the ability to explain observations of chemical phenomena with regard to their…

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…

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information.…

Acquiring conceptual understanding seems to be one of the main challenges students face when studying organic chemistry. Traditionally, organic chemistry presents an extensive variety of chemical transformations, which often lead students to recall an organic transformation rather than apply conceptual knowledge. Strong surface level focus and…

The submission of a traditional postgraduate research thesis (or dissertation) is a milestone achievement that should be celebrated and has been regarded as a rite of passage. This major document has normally occupied a significant amount of mental space and time, often involving a frantic and intense period of writing to meet the submission…

Students at the university level spend more and more time in learning management systems (LMSs), which support current teaching by offering online tutorials or units. These LMSs allow individual preparation for the students, especially in large classes. However, students' learning in these online systems is often not supported by detailed…

Reasoning about organic chemistry reaction mechanisms requires engagement with multiple concepts and necessitates balancing the relative influence of different chemical properties. A goal of organic chemistry instruction is to support students with engaging in this type of reasoning. In this study, we describe our use of case comparison problems…