Enhancing students’ agency and coherence in organic chemistry through transformed problem design

Research on mechanistic reasoning in Organic Chemistry has progressed in supporting students’ mechanistic reasoning and understanding how epistemic norms influence students’ personal epistemologies and their mechanistic reasoning practice as individuals. However, not much is known about students’ collaborative knowledge-building as a discursive practice in the moment of their learning in mechanistic reasoning classrooms. Thus, our study focuses on how different problem designs impact students’ knowledge-building in whole class discussions. We use design research comparing the impact of different problem designs, i.e. , single-case vs. case-comparison complex mechanisms tasks, in two semesters of a “Mechanistic Reasoning in Organic Chemistry” class for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students. To gain a deeper understanding of how students’ knowledge-building happens in their interactions with the instructor, we draw on sociocultural theory and make use of two specific constructs: (1) “epistemic agency” as power to shape knowledge-building and (2) “coherence” referring to the logical and consistent connection of ideas. Our findings show how transforming complex mechanism tasks from single-case to case-comparison problems provide students with different opportunities to enact epistemic agency and engage in coherent reasoning during discourse. Our findings have implications for developing instructional practices and resources to encourage meaningful, collaborative knowledge-building in mechanistic reasoning classrooms.