Reasoning about structure-reactivity and chemical processes is a key competence in chemistry. Especially in organic chemistry, students experience difficulty appropriately interpreting organic representations and reasoning about the underlying causality of organic mechanisms. As organic chemistry is often a bottleneck for students’ success in their career, compiling and distilling the insights from recent research in the field will help inform future instruction and the empowerment of chemistry students worldwide. This book brings together leading research groups to highlight recent advances in chemistry education research with a focus on the characterization of students’ reasoning and their representational competencies, as well as the impact of instructional and assessment practices in organic chemistry. Written by leaders in the field, Student Reasoning in Organic Chemistry is ideal for chemistry education researchers, instructors and practitioners, and graduate students in chemistry education.

The undergraduate organic chemistry course is a prerequisite course for many students who plan to pursue careers in chemistry and chemical engineering. It also serves those students who wish to pursue professional careers in medicine, dentistry, and veterinary sciences. Previous research on student learning in organic chemistry shows that students struggle to understand ideas such as acid-base reactions and structure-property relationships which are foundational concepts on which more complex concepts are built. Furthermore, the typical organic chemistry course emphasizes students use of the electron-pushing formalism to represent how bonds are formed and broken in chemical reactions. Expert organic chemists use this formalism to represent predicted reaction mechanisms that explain the formation of products. Numerous studies have characterized student difficulties using electron-pushing mechanisms in an expert-like way as well as associating underlying chemical principle with the representations. We suggest that deep understanding of chemical reactions and their underlying chemical principles can be developed by engaging students in causal mechanistic explanation as part of a transformed organic chemistry course that emphasizes students using their knowledge of electrostatics, structure-property relationships, and energy to engage in explanation of chemical phenomena. Our goal is to engage students in as specific type of explanation called in casual mechanistic explanation which includes reasoning about the underlying causal factors in conjunction with the underlying entities and their activities that bring the phenomenon about. The studies reported here use a qualitative approach to elicit student' written explanations and drawn reaction mechanisms for various chemical reactions. Students were sampled at multiple time points over the course of their two-semester organic course to investigate how student reasoning changes overtime. Students participants were enrolled in either the beforementioned transformed organic chemistry course or were enrolled in an untransformed course that we refer to as the traditional context. This traditional context served as a control group for which to compare possible changes in reasoning for students enrolled in the transformed course sequence. Findings suggest that student engagement in causal mechanistic reasoning varies depending on students' general chemistry and organic chemistry course experience as well as the nature of the prompt eliciting the reasoning. Findings also suggest that students are generally capable of drawing mechanistic arrows that would generally be considered correct, however triangulating student reasoning with a detailed analysis of students' drawings, we found that typical organic chemistry assessment items that lack a reasoning component may overestimate student understanding. Our investigations also revealed student difficulties invoking the correct nucleophilic substitution process for a given reaction. Students often invoked an SN1 mechanistic process incorrectly, despite their engagement in casual mechanistic reasoning. Implications of these findings for organic chemistry instruction and assessment are discussed along with implications for future research.

Problem solving is central to the teaching and learning of chemistry at secondary, tertiary and post-tertiary levels of education, opening to students and professional chemists alike a whole new world for analysing data, looking for patterns and making deductions. As an important higher-order thinking skill, problem solving also constitutes a major research field in science education. Relevant education research is an ongoing process, with recent developments occurring not only in the area of quantitative/computational problems, but also in qualitative problem solving. The following situations are considered, some general, others with a focus on specific areas of chemistry: quantitative problems, qualitative reasoning, metacognition and resource activation, deconstructing the problem-solving process, an overview of the working memory hypothesis, reasoning with the electron-pushing formalism, scaffolding organic synthesis skills, spectroscopy for structural characterization in organic chemistry, enzyme kinetics, problem solving in the academic chemistry laboratory, chemistry problem-solving in context, team-based/active learning, technology for molecular representations, IR spectra simulation, and computational quantum chemistry tools. The book concludes with methodological and epistemological issues in problem solving research and other perspectives in problem solving in chemistry. With a foreword by George Bodner.

A modern approach to improving education uses the components of experimental scientific research practices based on objective data, dissemination of results, and the use of modern technologies. STEM education research is maturing and new tools and analysis techniques become available. As one example, eye tracking, the recording of persons’ eye movements, has been growing in popularity as it enables researchers to study learning materials’ effectiveness, problem solving, and even students’ approaches during experimentation. Eye movements, as captured using eye tracking, can reveal information about a student's attention and cognition on a process level, going well beyond classical product-based assessment techniques such as questionnaires or tests.

The two-part, fifth edition of Advanced Organic Chemistry has been substantially revised and reorganized for greater clarity. The material has been updated to reflect advances in the field since the previous edition, especially in computational chemistry. Part A covers fundamental structural topics and basic mechanistic types. It can stand-alone; together, with Part B: Reaction and Synthesis, the two volumes provide a comprehensive foundation for the study in organic chemistry. Companion websites provide digital models for study of structure, reaction and selectivity for students and exercise solutions for instructors.

Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Award This comprehensive collection of top-level contributions provides a thorough review of the vibrant field of chemistry education. Highly-experienced chemistry professors and education experts cover the latest developments in chemistry learning and teaching, as well as the pivotal role of chemistry for shaping a more sustainable future. Adopting a practice-oriented approach, the current challenges and opportunities posed by chemistry education are critically discussed, highlighting the pitfalls that can occur in teaching chemistry and how to circumvent them. The main topics discussed include best practices, project-based education, blended learning and the role of technology, including e-learning, and science visualization. Hands-on recommendations on how to optimally implement innovative strategies of teaching chemistry at university and high-school levels make this book an essential resource for anybody interested in either teaching or learning chemistry more effectively, from experience chemistry professors to secondary school teachers, from educators with no formal training in didactics to frustrated chemistry students.