PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Students’ understanding of mathematics in the context of chemical kinetics
Page: 527
This work explores general chemistry students’ use of mathematical reasoning to solve quantitative chemical kinetics problems. Personal constructs, a variation of constructivism, provides the theoretical underpinning for this work, asserting that students engage in a continuous process of constructing and modifying their mental models according to new experiences. The study aimed to answer the following research question: How do non-major students in a second-semester general chemistry course and a physical chemistry course use mathematics to solve kinetics problems involving rate laws? To answer this question, semi- structured interviews using a think-aloud protocol were conducted. A blended processing framework, which targets how problem solvers draw from different knowledge domains, was used to interpret students’ problem solving. Preliminary findings describe instances in which students blend their knowledge to solve kinetics problems.