Multimodal processing of chemical representations: advantages of chemistry expertise and inadvertent challenges for learning

Chemists use verbal and visual representations of molecules to communicate and solve problems, yet little is known about how chemists efficiently interpret them simultaneously with ease. Participants (N = 200) of varied chemistry expertise completed an experiment in which they solved short representation-matching tasks with bond-line structures and IUPAC names of organic molecules. Drawing upon information-processing theory and prior chemistry education research on representational processing efficiency, we examined how expertise and varied task characteristics affected visual scanning efficiency. We recorded participants’ eye movements during the tasks to quantify the extent to which their gaze was focused or exploratory using a metric called stationary gaze entropy. Chemistry experts exhibited more focused gaze within the bond-line structures presented, which suggests that they more efficiently apply more chunk stimuli and activate prior knowledge connecting the representations. By looking at the effects of varied structural features and complexity, we outline inadvertent challenges that chemistry novices may face while processing these representations during chemistry instruction. We offer chemistry instructors suggestions for mitigating demands on their students’ working memory. We also propose avenues for follow-up research that will allow chemistry instructors to better understand how to scaffold their students’ development of the implicit skills associated with chemistry expertise.