Sunday, April 8, 2018 2pm to 3pm
About this Event
Greenville, NC 27858-4353
Spring 2016 semester seminar series hosted by the Department of Chemistry. FINAL SEMINAR for SPRING 2016
Speaker:
Dr. Jeffrey R. Raker
Assistant Professor – Department of Chemistry
Center for the Improvement of Teaching & Research in STEM Education
University of South Florida (Tampa, Florida)
Topic of Discussion:
“Understanding the Meaning Ascribed by Students to Representations Used in Organic Chemistry”
Friday, April 8th @ 2:00 – 3:00pm
Science & Technology Room C-209 (lecture hall) - go across the breezeway - 2nd floor
Reception to follow @ 3:00pm with light refreshments served - informal meet/greet with graduates and speaker
3rd Floor Conference Room (311) - SCITEC
ABSTRACT:
STEM disciplines rely on representations (e.g., equations, graphs, pictures) to communicate the relationships, trends, models, and theories of our disciplines. Success in organic chemistry is heavily related to not only a student’s ability to interpret representations of molecules, but also their ability to integrate those representations into models of the stepwise transformation of molecules into new molecules (i.e., reaction mechanisms and reaction coordinate diagrams). Previous work by organic chemistry education researchers has noted that students can successfully recreate molecular representations and reaction mechanisms without any understanding of the representations. Through several large-scale studies, we have both replicated this work and uncovered previously not found serendipitous connections made by the students between prior and new learning as well as unintended ascription of meaning to meaningless surface features of chemical representations. Implications for how organic chemistry instruction might address this unintended learning will be discussed. In addition, we will consider how the unintended learning might impact learning in courses that have an organic chemistry prerequisite requirement.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Raker is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of South Florida and the Associate Director of the ACS Examinations Institute. Before his career in academia, he earned a Bachelors of Science degree with Distinction in Chemistry from Ohio Northern University (Ada, Ohio), a Master of Arts degree in College Student Personnel from Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, Ohio), and a Doctorate in Chemistry from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana). Dr. Raker was also a postdoctoral research associate with the ACS Examinations Institute (at the time housed at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa).
Dr. Raker’s research is in chemical education with foci on assessment of learning in organic chemistry and upper-level course, and the application of survey research methodologies for understanding chemical education practices. Dr. Raker’s work has been featured as ACS Editors’ Choice articles and was recently invited to provide a commentary in Inorganic Chemistry on the future of undergraduate inorganic chemistry education.
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