Reasoning about Reactions in Organic Chemistry: Starting It in General Chemistry

The study presented here is a follow-up to a previous report in which we investigated how general-chemistry students in a transformed curriculum reason about simple acid–base reactions. In the present study, we use and adapt the previously developed coding scheme for a longitudinal study in which we follow students from general chemistry through organic chemistry. We find that (i) generally, the manner in which students reason about acid–base reactions increases in sophistication over the course of a two-semester sequence of organic chemistry; (ii) there is little difference in reasoning between students at the end of a transformed general-chemistry course and a similar cohort at the beginning of organic chemistry; (iii) the nature of a student’s general-chemistry experience has a profound effect on the sophistication of their reasoning in that students from a transformed general-chemistry course are more likely to provide causal mechanistic explanations for simple acid–base reactions than students with other general-chemistry experiences; and (iv) the type of acid–base reaction that the students discuss impacts the type of reasoning they exhibit. We find that when asked to explain a Lewis acid–base reaction, students are less likely to invoke electrostatic ideas.