Organic synthesis problems are a common assessment tool in organic chemistry courses, as they give instructors the opportunity to determine students’ ability to integrate and apply their knowledge of reactions and skills learned in the course. However, students often tend to be unsuccessful in solving them, even if they appear to have a strong grasp on other course material. We hypothesized that part of the reasoning behind this issue is because it can be challenging to integrate learning activities into the curriculum that give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge to synthetic problem solving, while still giving students the opportunity to master the underlying concepts (knowledge of organic reactions and reaction mechanisms). In addition, there is a gap in our understanding of the mental models students construct while solving these problems, as there is no evidence that they approach these problems in the same manner that experts do (i.e., retrosynthetic analysis). The research described in this thesis was performed to address these issues in two ways. First, we designed learning activities for students that were meant to help them develop more systematic approaches (whose benefits are supported by evidence) to solving synthesis problems, and determining if those learning activities could produce significant learning gains. The learning activities we designed were made available to students through out-of-class learning workshops, where learning gains were primarily measured through the analysis of students’ synthetic problem-solving abilities, assessed immediately before and after the workshops. Second, we sought to obtain a better understanding of students’ mental models when solving synthesis problems; specifically, we wanted to see if they had well-defined strategies for approaching these problems, and if they had a canonical understanding of how these strategies were meant to be applied. To do so, we invited students to participate in semi-structured think-aloud interviews, where participants were asked to solve synthesis problems. We investigated both of these topics using a constructivist paradigm for learning, which states that knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner rather than passively imparted. The process of knowledge construction is heavily influenced by the prior knowledge and experiences of the learner, and meaningful understanding of new knowledge is unlikely to occur if new knowledge cannot be accommodated by existing knowledge structures. Results from these studies indicated that the workshop-style intervention did not have any effect on students’ ability to successfully solve synthesis problems, but we did observe proficiency in the ability to use expert-like strategies, suggesting that more practice over time could lead to the ability to solve synthesis problems more effectively. Our analysis of the interview data showed that some students can proficiently use strategies in situations that are familiar to them, but do not appear to be able to apply those strategies to predict outcomes in unfamiliar situations; further, we observed a strong reliance on the use of reasoning that was based on memorized rules. Future work could further explore the mental models that students construct for solving synthesis problems; we recommend the incorporation of specific instruction on the use of synthesis problem-solving strategies, and research could explore the relationship between students’ abilities, and how synthesis is taught, practiced, and assessed in the organic chemistry curriculum.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/38182 |
| Date | 24 September 2018 |
| Creators | Bodé, Nicholas |
| Contributors | Flynn, Alison Barbara |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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