Teaching stereoisomers through gesture, action, and mental imagery

Author:

Ping Raedy1ORCID,Parrill Fey2ORCID,Church Ruth Breckinridge3,Goldin-Meadow Susan1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

2. Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA

3. Department of Psychology, Northeastern Illinois, 5500 North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60625-4699, USA

Abstract

Many undergraduate chemistry students struggle to understand the concept of stereoisomers, molecules that have the same molecular formula and sequence of bonded atoms but are different in how their atoms are oriented in space. Our goal in this study is to improve stereoisomer instruction by getting participants actively involved in the lesson. Using a pretest–instruction–posttest design, we instructed participants to enact molecule rotation in three ways: (1) by imagining the molecules’ movements, (2) by physically moving models of the molecules, or (3) by gesturing the molecules’ movements. Because gender differences have been found in students’ performance in chemistry (Moss-Racusin et al., 2018), we also disaggregated our effects by gender and examined how men and women responded to each of our 3 types of instruction. Undergraduate students took a pretest on stereoisomers, were randomly assigned to one of the 3 types of instruction in stereoisomers, and then took a posttest. We found that, controlling for pretest performance, both women and men participants made robust improvements after instruction. We end with a discussion of how these findings might inform stereoisomer instruction.

Funder

National Science Foundation

Publisher

Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)

Subject

Education,Chemistry (miscellaneous)

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