A Sociocognitive Perspective On The Activation Of Productive Epistemic Resources In College Students' Understanding Of Chemical Equilibrium

Science education, particularly in higher education, has a content coverage problem: it has long been described as "a mile wide, an inch deep" in various consensus documents from the National Academies. In chemistry education, the most common general chemistry curriculum covers topics as chapters based on the popular Sienko and Plane 1960's general chemistry textbook. The limited time available in such fast-paced coverage may limit the instructor's modeling and assessment of key performances in developing a mechanistic understanding of complex chemistry phenomena. In this sociocognitive, qualitative investigation, general chemistry II students' responses to assessment prompts were used to activate cognitive and epistemic resources about chemical equilibrium. Student response data was collected through an individual online activity worksheet as well as in-person think-aloud interviews, in which students were asked to draw, describe, calculate concentrations, reason about perturbations, and select mechanistic steps in a chemical equilibrium. To use the sociocognitive framing, the researcher attended general chemistry II lectures related to equilibrium for three instructors (two traditional curriculum, one transformed curriculum) and took observational field notes on the learning environment as well as the instructor's modeling of the content. Activities eliciting molecular level drawings were less likely to activate productive resources among participants. Additionally, student responses were categorized into five distinct epistemic resources including purely descriptive, graphical descriptive, symbolic descriptive, probabilistic descriptive, and dynamic descriptive. Additionally, students' responses in interviews mirrored the cognitive resources modeled by the instructor as seen in the observation such as common heuristics. This suggests that educators' assumptions about students' prior mathematical preparation does not activate productive resources for students' understanding.