Partial Charge Symbols Promote Productive Electrostatic Reasoning in Organic Chemistry

Abstract Students’ conceptions of organic chemistry are often grounded in memorized rules and heuristics, detached from the underlying principles governing molecular behavior. Electrostatics is a foundational determinant of reactivity, yet it is often underutilized in student reasoning due to its implicit nature in commonly used instructional molecular representations. The present study investigates whether representations that explicitly depict electrostatic information prompt students to engage in electrostatic reasoning when identifying electron donor and acceptor sites in polar reactions and how such reasoning relates to task performance. Results indicate that electrostatic explanations are strongly associated with higher accuracy across tasks. Additionally, representations that make electrostatic features explicit increase the likelihood of electrostatic explanations. Overall, the findings suggest that representations influence student performance indirectly by shaping the type of reasoning students employ and that simple electrostatic cues embedded within familiar representations may be sufficient to promote electrostatic explanations and support task success.