Chemistry Commons^™

Social Constructivism In Chemistry Peer Leaders And Organic Chemistry Students, Aaron M. Clark

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social constructivist learning is a goal in many STEM programs. The goal of this dissertation is to shed light on what that pedagogy looks like in the context of organic chemistry courses and by peer leaders whose job is to implement this pedagogy with general chemistry and organic chemistry students. Learning is complex; the social constructivist ideas presented in this dissertation, however, are a straightforward means for promoting learning. Qualitative and quantitative methods used to explore social constructivist learning are outlined.

Three investigations were conducted: First, approaches to learning by students completing the first semester of a yearlong organic chemistry …

Asking Why: Analyzing Students' Explanations Of Organic Chemistry Reaction Mechanisms Using Lexical Analysis And Predictive Logistic Regression Models, Amber J. Dood

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to evaluate student understanding of chemical reactions and reaction mechanisms, it is necessary to ask students to construct written or oral explanations of mechanistic representations. Studies have shown that students can reproduce pictorial representations of organic chemistry mechanisms without understanding the meaning of the representations. Grading written assessments is time-consuming, which limits their use in large-lecture courses. To address this limitation, lexical analysis and logistic regression techniques can be used to develop models that predict human scoring for constructed-response items. In this dissertation, students’ responses to constructed-response items about what is happening and why in organic chemistry reaction …