Chemistry Education and Research

Chemistry students have diffi culty learning chemistry for a variety of reasons. For example, many of them tend to fragment knowledge and then memorize those fragments or math algorithms; also, they tend to focus on the surface features of a visual representation. Conversely, when chemists study a complex research problem, they tend to engage in meaningful and productive learning strategies. Chemists tend to use mental images and to use multiple representations of phenomena when solving complex problems and they can switch from one representation to another. Animations and simulations are dynamic visualizations as opposed to static visualizations (e.g. diagrams, etc.). Th us, the goal of dynamic visualizations is to get chemistry students to visualize on the computer screen (i.e., external representations) the same types of representations of chemical phenomena that chemists mentally envision (i.e., internal representations). Th e question then arises: How can we gauge? what students understand aft er they have interacted with animations and simulations? My research group has found that their understanding (or ‘mental models’) can be probed when students draw and explain their conceptions of chemical phenomena. Th is talk is useful for anyone who needs to recognize how students learn from good multimedia soft ware in

chemistry.