Exploring Students’ Interpretations of Reactions and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Organic Chemistry in a Redesigned Organic Chemistry Curriculum

Abstract

Organic Chemistry has been described as a challenging and confusing course for undergraduate students. Novices in the field have been struggling to understand fundamental concepts relating to organic mechanisms and organize their knowledge around surface features such as functional groups rather than deep underlying features. At the University of Ottawa, a new “Mechanistic patterns and principles” curriculum was designed and implemented, organized by the underlying mechanistic patterns that govern reactions rather than the traditional surface features approach. The redesigned curriculum emphasizes principles of reactivity in organic chemistry and is organized in a gradient of difficulty. The three studies included within this work act as part of a larger evaluation of the redesigned curriculum, specifically investigating an instrument to assess the formation of expertise in organic chemistry and an instrument to capture self-efficacy beliefs in organic chemistry as students progress throughout the curriculum. In the first two studies, an open and closed online categorization task was delivered to Organic Chemistry II students at both the beginning and end of their course. The open sort provided insights regarding how participants choose to sort, while the closed sort measured participants' ability to categorize reactions according to their underlying mechanistic pattern. In the first study, we provide an in-depth analysis of the changes in expertise that occur with respect to the expertise of their choices and ability. Findings from this work demonstrated a positive shift from students attending to surface to process-oriented features in the open sort, as well as an increase in students’ ability in the closed sort. The following-up study investigates the relationship between the expertise demonstrated by participants in the open and closed sorts. Additionally, this work compares these measures of expertise against varies other metrics, including a high-stakes categorization task, and academic performance to increase the validity, and probes at the reliability of findings. Findings from this work demonstrate a strong relationship between the expertise demonstrate in the online task and academic performance, as well as describe an evolving relationship between the expertise demonstrated in students’ choice and ability as they progress throughout the course. While previous work in the evaluation of the curriculum demonstrated that students possess greater ability, it is unknown whether this also translates to an increase in their beliefs about their abilities. The last study included within this work moves beyond cognitive outcomes of the curriculum to investigating the role of self-efficacy beliefs in the curriculum. Self-efficacy beliefs are defined as an individual’s belief in their capability to perform a specific task or objective successfully. This work intends to construct and validate a task-specific, multi-dimensional self-efficacy beliefs instrument for undergraduate students in the domain of organic chemistry. Pre-administration validity evidence, including test content and response process validity, was collected. Data for internal structure validity evidence was collected from a single administration with Organic Chemistry I students (N=78) to 7-factor structure within the final 39 item instrument. Due to the small sample size, these results are interpreted with extreme caution. Future work with this instrument aims to improve the validity evidence collected by expanding the sample size and evaluate the influence curriculum on self-efficacy beliefs, and who, based on demographic variables, may be benefiting the most from the transformed curriculum.