Decorating with Arrows: Toward the Development of Representational Competence in Organic Chemistry

Much effort has been expended in developing improved methods for presenting mechanistic thinking and the curved-arrow notation to organic chemistry students; however, most of these techniques are not research-based. The little research that has been conducted has mainly focused on understanding the meaning that students associate with the curved-arrows during a single moment in time. The current research uses OrganicPad, an innovative, tablet person computer-based structure drawing program, to document our efforts to understand how second-year-level organic chemistry students’ mechanism use changes over their study of the subject. Our results reveal a dramatic evolution of mechanistic strategies during the academic year, including a large proportion of students who elect not to use the mechanistic convention in their work.