Solaire, Field, Michael, Sabrina, and Emma’s paper, Exploring student thinking about addition reactions, is now available in the Journal of Chemical Education. Through this research, Solaire, Field, Michael, Sabrina, and Emma captured students’ thinking as they worked through two addition reaction mechanisms on paper or with the Mechanisms app. In an acid-catalyzed reaction, students successfully identified hydronium as an acid catalyst and most students used it correctly over the course of the reaction. Students primarily relied on substitution when determining carbocation stabilization, but applied resonance correctly when they considered it. This implies that during instruction, teachers should provide more emphasis on weighing chemical properties to determine reaction pathways. Check out the paper here!
