Author(s):
Need: The Online Reasoning Chain Construction Assessment (ORCCA) project is being conducted by a team in chemistry and physics to develop a tool that has utility for examining the underlying reasoning that students utilize in solving problems. ORCCA tasks ask students to build an explanation to a question by creating a “chain” of various true statements. Through an analysis of the number, type, and connection of true statements used by students, these reasoning chains can provide insight into student thinking and skill development. This fills the need to develop new tools that can be used to gain insight in problem solving, an area that students often struggle with, and provides the opportunity to develop new strategies to help students develop strong reasoning skills. It is foreseen to have benefits in both pedagogical and research settings. Guiding Question: Chemical knowledge is built upon the interpretation of experimental results, and scientists engage in modeling as a way to reason chemically. In a classroom setting, modeling may be quite limited, and instead models extensively used, which can relegate experimental results to the role of illustration or justification for a model. The consequences for these reasoning differences (i.e. modeling vs. using a model) are unknown, but many students struggle with problem solving involving the interpretation of experimental data. The focus of this work therefore centers on inquiry for understanding how the ORCCA format can be utilized to provide insight into student reasoning in questions involving experimental data. Outcomes: Prior work in chemistry has illustrated the significant potential that there is for gaining insight into students’ reasoning patterns (e.g., Nagel, Lindsey, J. Chem. Ed. 2022, 99, 839). Building on this work, we are exploring other formats that can be offered to teachers and researchers. Examples from our explorations in the introductory chemistry setting will be presented to illustrate different formats and preliminary results will be shown. Broader Impacts: This project involves a chemistry and physics collaboration, where common approaches towards understanding student reasoning are being explored. In each discipline, there is a development of representation for connecting observations and experimental data that spans to the behavior of the submicroscopic. In chemistry, for example, this involves atoms and molecules, and the reasoning used by scientists in other areas (e.g., Biological Sciences) also includes development of representation involving macroscopic and submicroscopic connections. Knowledge gained in the investigations about how students reason with experimental data in chemistry may have broader impacts for other areas of STEM, offering new opportunities for collaboration and integration in the STEM fields.
Coauthors
Zoe Prats, University of Maine, Orono, ME, zoe.prats@maine.edu; Megan Nagel, Penn State Greater Allegheny, McKeesport, PA, mlm458@psu.edu; Beth Lindsey, Penn State Greater Allegheny, McKeesport, PA, bal23@psu.edu
