Field and Ina’s paper, Investigating students’ reasoning over time for case comparisons of acyl transfer reaction mechanisms, with collaborators David Kranz and Nicole Graulich in Germany, is now available in Chemistry Education Research and Practice. In this research, they describe a case study examining how students reason when considering acyl transfer reaction mechanisms. They examined three students’ reasoning at three time points during second-semester organic chemistry and identified the different ideas the students used to construct explanations when comparing activation energies for similar mechanisms. From their analysis, they demonstrated that students hold a wide range of reasoning strategies and differing abilities to weigh multiple chemical properties. They showed that the students in the case study ended up demonstrating similarly sophisticated reasoning at the end of the study despite starting at different points. From their study, they highlight a number of implications for instructors, including the importance for focusing on how students reason rather than the product of their reasoning. Check out the paper here!
