Exploring Representational Competence in Chemistry

Welcome to our first webinar of 2023. It is my pleasure to introduce Maya Popova, who's currently an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She started her academic career doing her bachelor's at Ivanova State University in Russia and then came over to Miami University to do her PhD with Stacey Lowry-Brett. And then we actually overlapped for a little bit when she was doing her postdoc with Marilyn Staines at University of Nebraska. So she's going to talk to us about what she's been working on. Thank you so much, Alina, for the kind introduction and also for the invitation. So happy to be here. Thank you, everybody, for making time to be here today. So I'm going to start sharing my screen. Okay, everybody can see my screen okay? Yeah? Good? Yes, perfect. Thanks, Alina, for that. All right, so the topic of today's webinar will be about representational competence. And let's talk about why representational competence, why we study this construct in our research group. So in chemistry, we cannot avoid representations. If you think about chemistry textbooks, on every single page of chemistry textbooks, you will see many representations and in every slide in your classroom you'll see representations. So representations are everywhere when it comes to learning chemistry and this is not surprising because representations are used as the language in chemistry. This is how we communicate about phenomena at the macroscopic and sub-macroscopic phenomena, sub-macroscopic level. And when it comes to chemistry students They come into our classrooms with a very difficult task to accomplish. Not only they need to learn various concepts, develop various scientific practices and skills, now they also have to get accustomed to this language of chemistry representations and learn how to use it. But this task is even that much more difficult for them because now not only they have to learn about representations, they also have to learn about various representations. And in chemistry we... routinely use multiple representations to depict the same idea, same molecule, same phenomenon. So on this slide, I have an example of a very small molecule, methanol, and just some of the ways in which we can represent this molecule. And our students, they are bombarded with all these representations in our classrooms, and oftentimes they are exposed to all these representations without even knowing why they learn all these different ways. of representing in this case a molecular structure. And so this is one of the reasons why we're so interested in this construct of supporting students in developing the set of skill that enable them to navigate all these representations successfully. So as a chemistry education researcher when it comes to any of the studies that I do obviously I always start with theory. We need a framework to kind of frame what we do. And in our research group, when it comes to representational competence, we have been relying on Cosman and Russell's representational competence framework. And the reason why we've been focusing on using this framework in particular is because technically this is probably one of the most popular frameworks for representational competence today. And by popular, I mean that this book chapter in which Cosman and Russell define and position this construct has been cited by almost 700 times by discipline-based education researchers from all over the world, from all kinds of disciplines. So it's been used quite a bit. So how does Cosmo and Russell define representational competence? So representational competence is a set of skills and practices that allow a person to reflectively use a variety of representations, singly and together, to think about, communicate, and act on chemical phenomena. So that's the official definition of according to Cosman Russell. And the critical part of this definition is that representational competence is a set of skills that enables the use of representations. And I briefly summarize the set of skills on my slide right here. So it's ability to interpret representations, ability to generate representations, translate between various representations, use representations to solve variety of problems, understand affordances and limitations of representations. select an optimal representation for a particular purpose, and also develop this epistemological understanding that representations, they depict chemical phenomena, but they are not chemical phenomena itself, and they're also not even a perfect representation of chemical phenomena, because they all are limited in some way. All right, so now even though this framework has been used and there has been a lot of studies designed looking into representational competence, unfortunately when it comes to the state of affairs today, there is still no consensus of representational competence as a unified framework. So in their book, Daniel and co-author talk about how currently in science education we still don't have a unified theoretical framework and Lyra and Stive talk about although our knowledge about representational competence continues to grow, we actually still know very little about how to support students in developing this set of skills. And I will unpack a little further a little later in my presentation why we're lacking this consensus even though people are using Cosmo and Russell's framework for their studies. the framework itself is used in a variety of different ways and so there's even within our community within chemistry community we don't have that consensus necessarily and more broadly in deeper that's definitely missing currently and so again as hopefully I convinced you that representational competence as a construct is this complex thing that is worthwhile understanding and studying further and we still have a lot of what to do to really understand how to support students, what can we do best to support our students in terms of learning about representations. And so in our research group we are approaching this construct from many different directions. So we've designed a variety of studies. We are developing an assessment instrument to measure representational competence skills and we have a NSF grant to do this work. We are also We've designed multiple studies in which we are using interviews and eye tracking to characterize student reasoning with representations. We are also looking at textbooks and how the effectiveness of textbooks for supporting student representational competence skills. And we've also designed several studies in which we're looking at how instructors support students in developing this set of skills. As you can see, each of these studies has a nice icon. So this is the assessment study. faculty study, textbook study, student studies, and you'll see these icons appear at the corner of my slides to kind of help you navigate as I jump from one study to another, which I will do quite a bit. But before I go into my claim for today, I cannot do that without first showing you these beautiful faces on my slide and saying thank you to all my great students who have been working with me on all these projects. So Lanisha and Frida have been working on the student study and the assessment study. Tamara and Anna have been working on the faculty study. And Ishan, Zoe, Robin, and Bailey have been working on the textbook study. I also want to give a shout out to Jeff and Justin, our collaborators who have participated and worked with us when it comes to some of these studies that I will be briefly mentioning today. So now I'm done with the introduction, we will get into the claim. So the claim I'm making today is that current instruction offers little to no support for developing students' metarepresentational competence skills. So this is my claim, and this is what we're going to try to unpack today, and I welcome your questions at the end about what I have to say today. But in order to really get at this claim and get at the evidence that I have to support this claim with our work, I would like to first start with theory. and unpack further theory to kind of understand why are we emphasizing metarepresentational competence skills. I will also introduce a definition for metarepresentational competence skills, so we have shared understanding of what is it that I'm talking about. And I'm also going to offer two example tasks to provide further examples of what I'm talking about. All right, so let's get started. And after I kind of... We dive into theory and build shared understanding of meta-representational companies, who will then go into the evidence to support this claim. All right. So as I said, Cosmo and Russell's framework is very popular, but it positions that set of skills simply as bullet points in their book chapter. The book chapter does not discuss the connections between the skills, potential relationships. It doesn't talk about potential hierarchies between the skills. So, and that really potentially limits the explanatory power of that framework. And in our work, studying how students reason about representations, study after study, we learned, we noticed that representational components are actually interconnected. And that Some representational competence skills bolster other representational competence skills. And so based on our knowledge of literature and theory, our extensive prior experience studying how students engage with representations and also current results of the studies in our group, we proposed our refined model of representational competence skills. And here is the model. As you can see in our model, we don't position, we now. sort of differentiate between lower level foundational representational competence skills that are depicted with the red knots, and then also higher level metarepresentational competence skills that are depicted by the blue knots. And we also established the relationships between the various skills by using arrows. Because the purpose of today's presentation is not how we got to this model, I won't talk about these arrows and how we establish some of these connections. I will just give you overall sort of... picture of what this model is communicating. And before I do that, I also want to emphasize why we think this is a valuable endeavor to do theory building work. So as Jennifer Lewis and colleagues said, the use of an established theoretical base for research has several benefits. Most importantly, the ability to tie ideas to existing knowledge, making research more comprehensible and logical to become a more mature discipline. chemistry education researcher must continue to conduct theory-based research and eventually develop and adopt theories unique to chemistry education. And I think we're doing just that. We're hoping, we hope that we're doing justice to what Jennifer was, you know, calling the community to do. But let's get into the model and how to make sense of this model. So as you can see, we position the use skill at the top of the model because we believe that this is the main RC skill, main representational competence skill. We believe that proficiency in using representations as tools to communicate about phenomena, visualize phenomena, predict, explain phenomena, this is what representational competence is about. And this is even actually reflected in the definition of representational competence that Cosmo and Russell offer. They position are seen as a set of skills that allow a person to reflectively use a variety of representations to think about, communicate, and act on chemical phenomena. And also, not only, we also argue that in order to be proficient at using representations, we need to develop these other representational competence skills because some of these representational competence skills for particular tasks support students. in using representations as tools. We also argue that in order to use representations effectively, we also need conceptual knowledge. So conceptual knowledge coupled with other representational competence skills is what enables us to use representations effectively. I'm talking quite a bit about the use skill because it's, as you can see, we're identifying it as the chief skill, so I'm unpacking it in a little more detail. But as you can see, we're also establishing two levels of the use skill. We are differentiating between the lower level use and higher level use skill. And lower level skill is when we are asked to make a near transfer inference from a representation, such as simple structure property inference, right? We ask our students to do that all the time in our chemistry assessments. However, there's also this higher level mental. meta-level use in which one is asked to make a far transfer inference in which we are using representations kind of like models to predict and explain phenomena. So that's the higher level of the use skill. So now let's jump into some of the other skills in this model. Interpret skill is at the bottom of our because this is the requisite for all other representational competence skills. Essentially, if you don't know how to interpret representations, you will definitely struggle translating between representations. You'll definitely struggle in using representations to making those higher level or low inferences. So this ability to interpret representations is fundamental to be able to complete tasks that require other representational competence skills. As you can see, and that's why all the arrows are pointing from use to the other RC skills. We also, as you can see, distinguish between two different levels of the generate skill and the lower level generate skill represents somebody being able to accurately reproduce a taught, a learned representation. So for example, to be cheeky here, I can teach representation, the reaction coordinate diagram in my classroom, and I want to expect that my students are then able to draw a correct reaction coordinate diagram for a particular reaction, right? So that will be an example of a lower level generate skill. Higher level generate skill, the metal level generate skill, represents the ability to invent or design a new representation for a particular purpose, much like scientists do, right? So that's our differentiation there. And the last skill I will comment on, which we actually don't position as a skill. So in Cosmo and Russell's framework, the ability to take this, to have that epistemological understanding that representations depict phenomena but are not accurate depiction of phenomena and not phenomena itself, is positioned as one of the bullet points. points. We don't think of this one as a skill. We think of it as a lens through which one views representations. So we position this as a frame or overarching perspective. So those are fundamentals and basics when it comes to the model. And we do not presume that our refined model is perfect. This model, its birthday was June 2nd, 2022. it's uh it's this model is in its infancy um we invite researchers studying students reasoning with the presentations to participate in the model refinement process with us and to test this model in other contexts but we do believe that this model is a useful contribution to the field because it provides new ways of thinking about instruction and research and here are some examples of implications that one can draw now having this model So an implication for research is that to capture representational competence, researchers should analyze student reasoning and competence with each skill individually and collectively. And here I will comment on kind of the state of studies in our field and beyond when it comes to representational competence and why that consensus in how we approach setting this construct is lacking. Current studies, first of all, first of all, do not focus on the meta-RC skills. So there's barely any work focusing on this side of the model. Second, studies are designed to investigate maybe two, maximum three, RC skills. And we don't have this idea that potentially this construct is more complex. And in order to make inferences about someone's representational competence, we need to have this comprehensive approach that targets all these skills. Even when studies are designed to evaluate multiple skills like two or three fundamental these foundational lower level skills, findings are reported for maybe each skill but no effort is made to make connections about how students perform on tasks that target various skills. So that connection building piece is also missing. Now, when it comes to implications for teaching, and this goes back to the claim that I'm making today, to support students in developing representational competence, instruction should focus not only on these lower-level foundational representational competence skills, but also on the higher-level method representational competence skills. And here, let's slow down and unpack the method representational competence skills, why I'm arguing for this so passionately. So... The reason why mental representational skills are important is because one can learn how to interpret, translate, generate, and even use representations without understanding why they're doing it. I'm going to repeat that again to let it sink in. A student can be very successful at interpreting or translating or generating representations without knowing why they're doing it. It might be this idea that, you know, the teacher tells me to do it, I do it. I get a good grade for it, but they have no idea why they're engaging in these tasks. And meta-representational competence is the subset of representational competence skills that allows for the reflective and purposeful use of representations. In other words, this is the, it's meta-RC is at the heart of understanding the why behind where a lot of various representations and why we're able to get proficient with all these different skills. This SESA has a lot to say about mental representational competence skills. and he argues for the importance of this set of skills in particular. De Sessa talks about how instructions and tasks that do not make sense to students undermine their motivation to learn and persist in science because they're just doing things, they're going with the flow, they don't know why they're doing what they're doing in the classroom. And De Sessa also said that meta-RC might be precisely what makes learning representations sensible to students. So I hope that I gave you a little bit more of understanding why I'm highlighting metarepresentational competence skills here in particular. And to provide additional clarity by what I mean by these skills. So my postdoc, Lanisha, and I, we were sitting and thinking for quite a bit about what supports currently exist out there, what tasks currently exist out there that, you know, I can showcase here in this presentation to provide more clarity. around some of these skills and we had to think pretty hard because there's not not that much out there. If you know of things please send it my way but I will show you two example tasks that have the potential to support students in selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose and also thinking about affordances and limitations of representation. So next two slides we will go into concrete tasks. Shout out to my post-doc Lanisha. All right here is a task that has the potential to support students in selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose, so developing that type of a skill. So this comes from the chemistry JL Gensher textbook by Gilbert, Keris, Bretz and Foster and here is a shout out to our beloved Stacey who is a co-author on this textbook. She used her CR expertise to help write this textbook. But something that is unique about this textbook is that at the end of every single chapter in this textbook, they have this visual matrix and all kinds of representations are in this visual matrix. And students are told to examine these representations and answer a set of questions. And so so example question here, which representations depict orbital overlap or which molecules contain delocalized pi electrons? So students have to carefully attend to every single representation and think about which representations clearly communicate these ideas and which do not, and which ones they would select to answer these questions and which they will not. This is not just supporting their ability to select representations. This is also supporting their ability to use representations to make inferences. But I'm putting emphasis on select since I'm trying to find something concrete, some concrete examples for the meta-RC skills. Another example comes from the Camp Tutor online tool developed by Martina Rao and her team. And in this tool, in this tutoring online tool, I have a screenshot where students are presented with a board monitor diagram. And they have explicit questions in which. They're asking students to look at the difference between the two different diagrams and kind of think about what one communicates and what the other communicates and then what each does not communicate. So they have a set of questions here that push students to reflect on differences and limitations of representations, which we don't see much out there. I don't see a lot of tasks like that. Again, if you find something, please send it my way. But here with. it's hard to read this text but the text here says the Bohr model only shows the relative energy levels of shells whereas the energy diagram shows the relative energy levels of orbitals with the green with orbitals and shells and then similar prompt here in three where again you have to compare the different the two different representations and think about what each represents and what each does not represent. Okay so I hope these examples helped. I'm not saying that these are perfect examples. because I think, I don't know how intentionally these tools have been designed to support these particular skills, but at least we saw evidence of some kind of support around developing these skills with these tools and tasks. So again, shout out to Stacy and Martina for all these wonderful resources that they're providing students with. Now let's go back to our claim. So I hope at this point you are with me. We went through the theory, we talked about meta-representational competence skills in particular, and I showed you some example tasks. And now let's come back to the evidence that we have from our research studies to support this claim that current instruction offers little to no support for developing students' meta-representational competence skills. And with that, I'm going to jump first in the textbook study. We'll have a couple of slides from there, and then we will go into the faculty study. Again, just two slides from the faculty study. So in our textbook study, we picked five commonly used textbooks, organic chemistry textbooks. And all of these textbooks, they teach organic chemistry using the functional group approach. And we were interested in how do these textbooks support students in developing representational competence skills around. commonly used representations of molecular structure. So we have eight different representations of molecular structure and we were looking for all the pages in which these textbooks first introduce all these representations because we were interested in how are these textbooks teaching about these representations. And so therefore we found 237 pages across the five textbooks dedicated to these representations including 73 work examples and 146 practice problems. So how did What did our analysis look like? Here's an example of a passage from one of the textbooks. So this is the McMurray textbook, specifically a work example from the McMurray textbook. And how do we call this? So in this work example, they're asking students to learn to draw the chair conformation of a substituted cyclohexane. And so they're giving they're giving students an IUPAC formula and they're asked to draw a corresponding chair conformation. And so in coding this work example, we coded this as generate chair confirmation because obviously the task is asking students and asking them to practice drawing a chair confirmation. And then we also see that as they're drawing the chair confirmation, they're also practicing translating from this AIPAC formula to the chair confirmation. And then finally, in this work example. They're also supporting students in interpreting the Cherokee information because they're providing additional information about how to interpret this representation and also we have clear labels sort of labeling different method groups as axial tutorial providing additional support for making sense of this representation. So essentially this passage of text we will code it as having potential to support students in interpreting, translating, engineering representations because it's engaging students in practicing these skills as they're doing this work example. So now let's see what the data looks like for the Cherokee information across the five textbooks. So here we have the Cherokee information. Five textbooks are on top. TWP right here stands for Text, Work, Examples, and Practice Problems. And then we use the Cosmonaut and Russell framework to code what's going on in the textbook. Something you can notice right away is that we don't even have all the skills in the framework here because we did not find, for example, evidence that these textbooks support students in practicing selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose. So Stacy's textbook does that to some extent, these organic chemistry textbooks we found no evidence whatsoever. When we look at the data for generic information, we notice that across the five textbooks things look very similar, right? All five textbooks very consistently teach interpret, translate, generate, and use skills. for this representation across text, work examples and practice problems very consistently. So that's an interesting observation. Now when we look at the same analysis for dash-fetch diagrams, we see a big difference in our findings. Again, interpret, translate, generate and use are the most commonly supported skills, but things are pretty spotty. Textbooks don't consistently teach them across text, work examples and practice problems. And we don't see like some textbook support students provide more supports for this representation like McMurray and Laudan. There is way more supports across the different components of the book. We see the Bruce completely empty. Why? Well, because dash wedge diagrams appear in Bruce and they immediately start using them without even explaining what the dashes and wedges mean. So there is no even one sentence to kind of. let's pause and interpret what the dashes and wedges mean before we start using it. It's just, they just use it in chapter one. So maybe there's an assumption that students should know this from general chemistry, but we can see a very different picture. Something else that our team was puzzled by, if you think about which of these two representations is more commonly used in organic Imagine you all will agree with the dashed wedge diagrams and skeletal structures are two most commonly used representations of organic chemistry because once students move into reactions, that's how we represent reactions. And shirka formations, we don't use them to the same extent as dash-watch diagrams. And somehow this representation that potentially is way more useful, there's way less support for developing these skills in context of this representation. Now this analysis here kind of focuses more on individual representations. Now let's look at the analysis where we're going to focus on individual RC skills a little, just a little more. So here we have a radar chart for just three textbooks to make things a little more simple. And this is for texts specifically, our analysis of the text in these three textbooks. How do you interpret this radar chart? Right here we have the different RC skills and the numbers 0 through 8 represent the number of representations. So we had eight representations of molecular structure we were focusing on and so if we focus on the generate skill here, how do we interpret this? we will interpret it that Klein textbooks in the text teaches students how to generate four different representations of molecular structure. I hope that's clear and you're following. So now we can see that McMurray and Bruce textbooks, they provide a lot of support for interpreting and translating pretty much all the representations that we were looking at in the text, but there are some gaps right here and for limitations and affordances we see. some gaps. Client is associated with more of a rounded shape meaning that they provide these supports for about half of the representations in text. Now let's compare the radar charts from worked examples and practice problems to the one that we found in text. So something that immediately stands out is complete emptiness on this side. So students are never... asked to ever think about affordances and limitations of representations in work examples and practice problems. Essentially, they don't have opportunities, they're never encouraged to practice engaging that sort of thinking. And I also want to throw in a caveat that even when these things appeared in text, oftentimes discussion of affordances and limitations of representations look like a single sentence that can be very easily overlooked. And so overall, we can see that there is very limited support for students to develop these skills. Something else we can also notice is that the client shape here is consistently larger than McMurray and Bruce, suggesting that the client textbook encourages students to practice developing these skills for a larger number of representations. So that's what I wanted to share with you when it comes to our textbook study. And we will jump, I have two more slides for the faculty study. We found something very similar when doing our faculty study. So in this study we interviewed 13 chemistry professors teaching a range of chemistry courses. So organic and organic, general biochemistry, all kinds of courses. And we asked them, our interview protocol included questions such as, are there any skills that you want your students to develop when they learn about representations? Or when you introduce new representations in your course, what strategies do you use to make sure your students understand them? And how do you know that your students understand the representations that you introduce in your course? So example interview questions. So what did we find? So here's the data from these 13 chemistry professors. So on the y-axis we have the 13 instructors, on the x-axis we have the various RC skills, and this is what they report to teach and what they reported to assess. So as we can see a lot of the instructors talked about teaching students, interpreting, generating, and translating the representations. And some also talked about assessing some of these skills, specifically, a lot talked about assessing student ability to generate representations in their assessments. And here are some example quotes to kind of show you where, how we got, how we, how this data came, where it came from. So here's a quote from a biochemistry instructor who said, sometimes the students are interpreting their representation on their own first, and then we're talking about it. So that is a common group question that I do where they might see a new representation like a new metabolic pathway or a movie of ATP synthase. So obviously, the instructor clearly used the word interpreting, so it makes our coding so straightforward. But this is sort of them describing what they're doing in that classroom. Now, another example of when they talk about their assessments. So an organic chemistry professor said, on exams, we have questions explicitly. about representations which would just be sort of converting from one to another. So they didn't use the word translate which we didn't expect them to but obviously they're talking about the translate skill. which early on in the course are more appropriate because that's actually the skill we're trying to develop, you know, how to convey chemical structure to different sorts of representations. But then we also see that there's very little discussion happening around some of these skills and we found some quotes that suggested to us that some instructors teach RC skills without even realizing it. And so here are some example quotes that kind of depict that. So participant seven said I don't aim to develop any skills I just think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding. Participant ten said I guess I don't think about representations that much when I teach my course and participant five said this is the first time I'm really thinking about teaching about representations I just sort of I just do it. So that's those are some of the findings from our faculty study and overall we can see that there are some consistent findings. from our textbook and faculty studies, we can see that both textbooks and faculty, they support, they provide some supports for interpreting, generating, translating, and using representations. There are very limited support for understanding affordances and limitations of representations, and we found no evidence for some of the other RC skills. So now let's go back to our claim, so our claim and emerging implications from this claim. So as we can see, current instruction offers little to no support for developing metarepresentational competence skills. And so one implication that obviously we will offer to instructors is that instructors need to prioritize not only the lower level foundational RC skills, but also the higher level meta RC skills. Now having said that, I want to emphasize that this responsibility does not lie only on the instructors. We as a research community now need to support instructors in helping develop their students' RC. And two things that we could do is to design, develop, and evaluate classroom-ready formative tasks, activities, and assessments that are shown, that are tested, and show that they support students in developing these RC skills effectively. And also we can be thinking about designing, facilitating, and evaluating various professional development activities for faculty when it comes to teaching about representations. And with that, This is a picture, kind of an outdated picture, actually, of my research group. And contact information on the bottom. And a QR code that you can scan to get to the website of my research group. And I will take any questions that you have. Thank you so much for your attention. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that. So let's do questions. I guess there's a few ways we can do this. So if you want to raise your hand, I can kind of call on y'all in order and unmute you. If you want to post them in the chat, I can ask them or you can just ask them in the chat. Whatever feels good. Take it away. I will start calling on people. OK, I'm joking. Rebecca, start us off. I just have a clarification question real quick because I'm thinking a whole bunch about what you just said, which was fascinating. But with the textbook, when they were talking about the dash-fudge diagrams, there was no discussion even in the text about the limitations of using that and all of the information it doesn't tell us? Nope, nope. There's really very little discussion about that, which is why we also believe that potentially instructors are not doing the same, which we found very limited evidence of that when instructors were discussing what they're doing. There's some research out there that shows that instructors use textbooks as a curriculum pretty much. And they sort of stick to the way textbooks explain things. They just stick to that by using the slides from the publisher. And so given that textbooks don't communicate these ideas, you know, you get those slides and you're not going to talk about those either. So yeah, there's very little of that in textbooks. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that question. So we've got some spicy ones in the chat. Were there any differences between instructors use of RC skills if they primarily taught graduate level courses versus introductory courses? That's a great question. I don't have the answer to that question because our sample size was pretty small for that study 13 instructors. So we were looking at various patterns but again I cannot make strong claims about that. We did see some differences in faculty discussion about the challenges that they encounter when it comes to teaching with representations depending on the course that they taught. So something that caught my eye that was very interesting was conversations I had with analytical chemists. Analytical chemists talked about how their job teaching with representations is actually difficult because in their courses, not only they have to teach about various sort of diagrams of instruments, they also need to talk a lot about various statistical representations. And they kind of discussed this idea that, look, I'm a chemist, I am not, you know, I'm not a statistician. So they found it challenging that they had to navigate this variety of representations and do a good job teaching them. So there were some conversations that were unique to the subject you teach but I cannot make claims about those differences like that. All right I'm gonna keep on with Molly's questions for a second. So based on the textbook project have the results of this study impacted thoughts on textbook use? I think so. Well I stopped I converted to using client textbook but not only for the this reason obviously I want to preface every single study I showed you today is extremely limited, right? Even the textbook study alone, we are only looking at those eight representations of molecular structure. We are looking at how they're supporting RC scales, but textbooks are so much more than just that, right? There's so much more packed in textbooks. So there are multiple reasons why we switched to CLIMB, but definitely those analysis kind of helped with that. So, yeah. Okay, and then Stephanie has some kind of big questions. So is representational competence being used in other disciplines? And if so, how so? Very similarly to what we do in chemistry, except for this framework is just adopted in the context of other disciplinary representations, so in physics and biology. So any deeper field, other researchers are also focusing on representations and supporting students learning about it. representations supporting students drawing representations there's like a very broad literature base about drawing to learn that comes from other disciplines like biology for example i would say that chemistry is a bit unique in this sense and i think you know i have a sense i have a feeling that in chemistry we focus on representations way more than other different disciplines just because that idea that representations are a language of chemistry and we need to depict this sub-microscopic phenomenon that is invisible and macroscopic phenomenon you So we're definitely in chemistry talking about the invisible, which is how else do you talk about it? But really, it's used across all deeper disciplines. I don't know if I answered that question, but I think that's what it was getting at. I'm going to invite Vicente to hop in here. Sure. Maya, thank you for your webinar. I was curious about your ideas. When you talk about representation, presentations, in a certain way, your model is quite general. It doesn't speak to the level of conceptual understanding in chemistry that is needed to interpret each of the different representations that we use. So concerning these questions about biology and things like that, I always wonder how easy it would be to transfer the skills. within chemistry and across disciplines. It's just because you become very good at dealing with one type of representation, is that going to translate in your ability to deal with other representations within chemistry and other disciplines? So I'm kind of wondering to what extent it's an impossible dream to develop representational competency when it seems to be so tied to... the specific nature of the representation. And the second thing that I wanted you to comment is that in the same way that I think that we sometimes try to teach too much in chemistry in terms of concepts and ideas, are we not trying to teach too many representations for the kinds of things that the students can handle? I'm trying to take notes because there's a lot. So you might need to remind me of all the different aspects that you brought up with your questions. Let me start with the latter one and we'll jump in the first one. So are we teaching too much? I think so. As I was saying with the textbook study, for example, somehow things like human projections and character combinations, there's like tons of pages of textbooks dedicated to these presentations. Yet for the rest of the curriculum, we use them rarely. Maybe like when we're thinking about elimination reactions and they don't really appear in organic chemistry 2 or... really rarely. And so the question is, is it worth it putting students through like a whole week of instruction and making sure that they... I don't know. It's for the organic chemistry community to think about, but that is a thing that came out of that study that we can all think about. Are we teaching too much? Potentially. And now I'm advocating, yes, we need to teach DRC skills properly too, right? But the thing is that we are already teaching about representation, so we might as well teach better if we can, right? And I think also when we teach about representations as instructors, it's also about, I don't think it should take that much time. to embed in your instruction messages about affordances and limitations of representations, messages about modeling, epistemological messages about why we use representations and why we learn all these skills. But if done consistently and intentionally, if these messages are sprinkled out, I think that can help students have this higher awareness about all these skills. So that's one point. Now, Vicente had way more. Another question Vicente had was about how transferable this model could be for other contexts. And I think we've thought about that quite a bit. So I, as you all know, in grad school, I looked at reaction point diagrams and reactions, other sets of representations. Lanisha, my postdoc, she looked at various representations of spectra, IR spectra. spectroscopy and MR spectroscopy so that's something she she did uh when she was doing her PhD and we both thought quite a bit about how this model translates into designing studies for these other representations that we've studied in the past and how if we had this model perhaps our studies would have been even more thought-provoking and we would have learned more and I believe that they translate I feel like this can this question can take like me talking for 30 minutes while providing complete examples so I If you all want to have a conversation, I'm happy to jump on Zoom anytime and kind of brainstorm that. But I do believe that the model is transferable to other contexts. There was another thing that set the bread up, which was about conceptual understanding in relationship to representational competence. And that is absolutely true. There is that important connection. And but... When Vicente brought that question, you specifically emphasized the interpretation of representation. In our group, we are kind of differentiating between like two different knowledge bases almost. There is knowledge base of understanding the representation itself and how to interpret the various features of that representation. But when it comes to, so for the interpreting representations, you do need to know concepts. So, for example, if you're looking at a structure, you need to identify a chiral center. You obviously need to know what a chiral center is, but you need to know what features of the representation to attempt to identify the chiral center. But for higher level youth skill, not only you need that sort of knowledge about the representation and the features and how to interpret and what they mean. Now you're pulling in from other conceptual information to make those higher level inferences. Even sometimes inferences, lower level inferences about structured property relationship. push the learner to not only consider their knowledge of the representation but also pull this additional knowledge based on what you are making the inference so it's quite complex yes and we have a lot of unpacking to do and maybe there was something else in this question that i don't remember i want to actually hop in and tie back to stephanie's question let's say the learner does this and they develop this awesome representational competence in chemistry, what can they then go on and do with it? Can they go into other classes and use it? So representational competence is similar to conceptual knowledge in the sense that you can be competent with one representation and not so much with the other, right? Just like with conceptual understanding, you can be proficient with one topic. You are really good at understanding equilibrium, but not so good at thermodynamics or acid base or... I don't know, quantum chemistry or something, right? So similar to that, with RC, you can be really good with one set of representations and not so much with others. So when you say you're developing this awesome RC in chemistry, I will put a caveat that yes, but that might still mean that you are better with some representations than others. And then what you can do with it, I think that we kind of... I kind of positioned with the model this idea that there are different levels to the use skill, there are different levels to the generate skill, that if you have that basic use, basic generate proficiency, hopefully you're able to then move to those more sophisticated ways in which we're using representations or you're able to generate a novel representation. So very much like, you know, like modeling the scientific practices, you engage in that, you are more prepared to engage in that practice. Obviously, you cannot go from zero to 100. We need to scaffold how we get there. We need to start with simpler tasks and then get to those more complicated tasks. But building those foundational RC skills enables us to then be more proficient with higher level things like using representations to predict and explain phenomena. Okay, since that's Ryan Schtick, I'm going to invite him to weigh in here. I have a schtick. That's cool. Hi, Maya. Hey there. I'm curious as to your thoughts on what a chemistry course, we can make it an organic chemistry course because that'll be more intelligible to me, would look like that really signals to students that the point of representations is to simplify systems to predict and explain. Because when I think about, you know, like our first semester, we do the RS like stereochemistry thing that everybody does. It's not clear to me as the instructor why people are doing it apart from like it's a skill that they have to trot through. And in most courses I've ever seen, certainly in the introductory sort of organic sequence, we talk briefly about chiral environments, say thalidomide was bad. Now let's assign RNS for like three days. And then, you know, maybe we have people draw mixtures of stereoisomers for a variety of reactions the rest of the semester. So I think like our status quo doesn't do. what it would need to to signal to students that the point of representations is to simplify systems to explain. So what would a course look like that would message something different than the course I just described, than our course here at UW, than I think most organic courses? I don't think I'm going to say something unique or really novel here. I think potentially for your particular question, it's about connecting these representations and these concepts to real world phenomena. where they are used. So in your example with RS, right, it's not only teaching students about, you know, getting them through dozens of tasks where they practice and practice and practice correctly doing that, but it's also having conversations again about applicability of these ideas and that the fact that, you know, chemistry of our bodies is controlled by chiral molecules and that that's how the... principles of drug design are really much related to thinking about chirality and thinking about connecting it to biochemistry and thinking about how the proteins in our body are made of amino acids and nitrogen of 20 are chiral and again connecting it back to that drug design so that hopefully provides a context for why are we practicing doing this skill why is it important to identify rns non-tumors why are we working with a representation that allows us to distinguish between those two enantiomers. So I think potentially connecting it to real world applications and phenomena is the way to go. What do you think, Ryan? I keep wondering what is students' role in making those connections? Because, you know, I do all that. I've even brought in you know, limonene and antimers or whatever. And everyone goes, oh, they smell different. Oh, my receptors in my nose must be chiral, see glove analogy. But the work that they're actually doing, the things they get credit for, and most examples I've seen here and elsewhere of assigning absolute configuration, it's just the skill, right? Did I assign RRS right? Did I do the thing that ChemDraw could do with a button press? And so I... strongly suspect that we haven't looked at this skill in particular. We've looked at others that students see the point of the skill as placing the teacher, jump through the hoop and moving on with their life. And that's not great. I mean, if that is true, like if all we really do with this is assign R and S, tell them thalidomide's bad, from their perspective, it's a random skill that has no purpose. And then they move on, then why do we do it at all? So I guess like, would we want to move phenomena to the center and then think about... phenomena that would require you to grapple with handedness to understand. And then if you need to then talk about handed things, you would have to call them something distinct from each other. Yes, which is where, again, I want to circle back to that idea that we talk a lot about what the learning environment should look like, what instructors should do, but it's really our responsibility as researchers to design these tasks that put phenomena at the center, to design the tasks that push students to. you know, think about why we're using representation. So I think it's also our responsibility to really support instructors in creating those learning environments where that's even possible. Because again, you cannot go from zero to a hundred and reinvent your entire course without having proper resources and support. So yes, I do. A lot of work needs to be done to make that happen for sure. Yeah, job security. Yay, anyone else? I don't know if I missed something in the chat or not. I don't think so. Can I throw back to one of the quotes from one of the polymer chemists that you interviewed who said that they've always just thought about representations as tool? Yes. And what's an RC activist's take on that? Is it aligned or misaligned? I'm going to read the quote again. Okay. I don't aim to develop any skills. I just think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding. In my mind, they're actually talking about the same thing I am talking about. They just don't recognize that as something important. So when they're saying they think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding, in my mind, yes, that's what you do. You use representations as effective tools to explain phenomena, visualize phenomena. That's great. Except for this. This instructor does not recognize that in itself as something that students need potential support with. They're kind of flipping the conversation on only concepts matter. My job is to teach them concepts and they need to have a solid conceptual understanding. They're not thinking through the fact that in order to develop a conceptual understanding, we use representations to get there. And we just tacitly assume that students are... you know, proficient with representations and we can just focus on concepts. So that's kind of the conversation I had with this particular instructor. So I think he was actually talking about RC without realizing what he's talking about and how why that's important. But good I, Alina. I find that quote also very intriguing. It's a complex one. Can we get a final? spiciest question does anyone want to close this out you put pressure on everybody now people are like oh no is my question the spiciest if not oh no okay risa oh that's what i needed love it so i don't feel like my question is very spicy but uh here it goes um when you described kazma and russell my experience with um you with them is primarily through visualization. And I feel like a lot of like what their work was built upon was Johnstone's triangle. And, and it sounds, and also kind of cognition at that time. And I find it really interesting that you're merging epistemology, yet I don't quite hear the epistemology as much, like, even though I saw it in your slide. And the reason I say that is because at times it sounds to me. a little bit like you're kind of, I think, describing that students can't, or they're limited in their ability to use representations. And I don't think epistemology would maybe go there. And I guess I'm struggling with that in kind of, you know, taking in the framework, because I feel like epistemology looks at the resources that students can access. And and do access and sometimes incorrectly. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that aspect. One, why a visualization framework that I think was really looking, and I wonder, I mean, it really did, I think they focused a lot on atomic level animations at that time. I know Russell, I remember at a Gordon conference actually presenting several animations or visualizations that kind of blended the three levels. And he was really proud of the fact that... that in with Johnstone's triangle in mind, it seemed to do all of that in one kind of tool. And so I know that that's where they were headed. So I guess, anyway, I don't know if I'm making sense, but I guess I'm, I'm really curious as to that blend between epistemology and a visualization framework. And I guess I would, yeah, I'll, I'll leave it there. I'm rambling. So I love your question. Thank you so much. That is, I feel like that was pretty spicy. So I I feel like you do. Now, when it comes to epistemology, so the model is already getting pretty complex. So I don't know how much we can add to it. without it completely not making sense anymore because if you think of it that way then you know we should be also connecting it to conceptual knowledge we should be connecting it to um you know spatial ability and epistemology like there's there's so like everything is so interrelated all the theories are so interrelated that you know you could be building this whole network uh and uh i think in order for this thing to make sense and have uh utility it has to be confined at some extent, but then nothing stops us to combine frameworks. This is where I am right now. You might talk to me in a year and I might change my mind because we're looking at studies and but in fact my graduate student Frida, who is here, shout out to Frida, she is doing a study in which she's looking at how students make inferences from representations of molecular structure about stability and she is combining this RC perspective. with resources perspective. She is looking at what resources are students activating, they are asked to make these inferences and interestingly something that Freire is finding that once students attend to Lewis structure they attend to every single feature to make inference. Loan payers, bonds, electrons, the atoms themselves, like everything. From everything in that representation people can make inference apparently. That's interesting. So we are combining these perspectives, but we use them as, right now, separate frameworks, and we draw from both of those frameworks in our analyses. We also draw a lot from reasoning literature, from dissenters' work. So we are essentially combining a lot of theory to inform our work. I hope that answers your question, Risa. Thanks. I think on that note, we're going to call it. Can we thank our speaker one more time? Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It was nice hanging out with you all on this Tuesday evening. Thank you. And we'll post the recording of this so that folks can get all the resources that were in it. Thank you. Perfect. All right. Nice seeing everyone. Thank you, Maya. Thank you. all right what do we do now nothing that's it let me stop the recording perfect

So she's going to talk to us about what she's been working on. Thank you so much, Alina, for the kind introduction and also for the invitation. So happy to be here. Thank you, everybody, for making time to be here today. So I'm going to start sharing my screen.

Okay, everybody can see my screen okay? Yeah? Good? Yes, perfect.

Thanks, Alina, for that. All right, so the topic of today's webinar will be about representational competence. And let's talk about why representational competence, why we study this construct in our research group.

So in chemistry, we cannot avoid representations. If you think about chemistry textbooks, on every single page of chemistry textbooks, you will see many representations and in every slide in your classroom you'll see representations. So representations are everywhere when it comes to learning chemistry and this is not surprising because representations are used as the language in chemistry. This is how we communicate about phenomena at the macroscopic and sub-macroscopic phenomena, sub-macroscopic level. And when it comes to chemistry students They come into our classrooms with a very difficult task to accomplish.

Not only they need to learn various concepts, develop various scientific practices and skills, now they also have to get accustomed to this language of chemistry representations and learn how to use it. But this task is even that much more difficult for them because now not only they have to learn about representations, they also have to learn about various representations. And in chemistry we...

routinely use multiple representations to depict the same idea, same molecule, same phenomenon. So on this slide, I have an example of a very small molecule, methanol, and just some of the ways in which we can represent this molecule. And our students, they are bombarded with all these representations in our classrooms, and oftentimes they are exposed to all these representations without even knowing why they learn all these different ways. of representing in this case a molecular structure.

And so this is one of the reasons why we're so interested in this construct of supporting students in developing the set of skill that enable them to navigate all these representations successfully. So as a chemistry education researcher when it comes to any of the studies that I do obviously I always start with theory. We need a framework to kind of frame what we do. And in our research group, when it comes to representational competence, we have been relying on Cosman and Russell's representational competence framework. And the reason why we've been focusing on using this framework in particular is because technically this is probably one of the most popular frameworks for representational competence today.

And by popular, I mean that this book chapter in which Cosman and Russell define and position this construct has been cited by almost 700 times by discipline-based education researchers from all over the world, from all kinds of disciplines. So it's been used quite a bit. So how does Cosmo and Russell define representational competence? So representational competence is a set of skills and practices that allow a person to reflectively use a variety of representations, singly and together, to think about, communicate, and act on chemical phenomena. So that's the official definition of according to Cosman Russell.

And the critical part of this definition is that representational competence is a set of skills that enables the use of representations. And I briefly summarize the set of skills on my slide right here. So it's ability to interpret representations, ability to generate representations, translate between various representations, use representations to solve variety of problems, understand affordances and limitations of representations. select an optimal representation for a particular purpose, and also develop this epistemological understanding that representations, they depict chemical phenomena, but they are not chemical phenomena itself, and they're also not even a perfect representation of chemical phenomena, because they all are limited in some way. All right, so now even though this framework has been used and there has been a lot of studies designed looking into representational competence, unfortunately when it comes to the state of affairs today, there is still no consensus of representational competence as a unified framework.

So in their book, Daniel and co-author talk about how currently in science education we still don't have a unified theoretical framework and Lyra and Stive talk about although our knowledge about representational competence continues to grow, we actually still know very little about how to support students in developing this set of skills. And I will unpack a little further a little later in my presentation why we're lacking this consensus even though people are using Cosmo and Russell's framework for their studies. the framework itself is used in a variety of different ways and so there's even within our community within chemistry community we don't have that consensus necessarily and more broadly in deeper that's definitely missing currently and so again as hopefully I convinced you that representational competence as a construct is this complex thing that is worthwhile understanding and studying further and we still have a lot of what to do to really understand how to support students, what can we do best to support our students in terms of learning about representations. And so in our research group we are approaching this construct from many different directions. So we've designed a variety of studies.

We are developing an assessment instrument to measure representational competence skills and we have a NSF grant to do this work. We are also We've designed multiple studies in which we are using interviews and eye tracking to characterize student reasoning with representations. We are also looking at textbooks and how the effectiveness of textbooks for supporting student representational competence skills.

And we've also designed several studies in which we're looking at how instructors support students in developing this set of skills. As you can see, each of these studies has a nice icon. So this is the assessment study. faculty study, textbook study, student studies, and you'll see these icons appear at the corner of my slides to kind of help you navigate as I jump from one study to another, which I will do quite a bit.

But before I go into my claim for today, I cannot do that without first showing you these beautiful faces on my slide and saying thank you to all my great students who have been working with me on all these projects. So Lanisha and Frida have been working on the student study and the assessment study. Tamara and Anna have been working on the faculty study.

And Ishan, Zoe, Robin, and Bailey have been working on the textbook study. I also want to give a shout out to Jeff and Justin, our collaborators who have participated and worked with us when it comes to some of these studies that I will be briefly mentioning today. So now I'm done with the introduction, we will get into the claim. So the claim I'm making today is that current instruction offers little to no support for developing students' metarepresentational competence skills.

So this is my claim, and this is what we're going to try to unpack today, and I welcome your questions at the end about what I have to say today. But in order to really get at this claim and get at the evidence that I have to support this claim with our work, I would like to first start with theory. and unpack further theory to kind of understand why are we emphasizing metarepresentational competence skills. I will also introduce a definition for metarepresentational competence skills, so we have shared understanding of what is it that I'm talking about. And I'm also going to offer two example tasks to provide further examples of what I'm talking about.

All right, so let's get started. And after I kind of... We dive into theory and build shared understanding of meta-representational companies, who will then go into the evidence to support this claim. All right.

So as I said, Cosmo and Russell's framework is very popular, but it positions that set of skills simply as bullet points in their book chapter. The book chapter does not discuss the connections between the skills, potential relationships. It doesn't talk about potential hierarchies between the skills. So, and that really potentially limits the explanatory power of that framework.

And in our work, studying how students reason about representations, study after study, we learned, we noticed that representational components are actually interconnected. And that Some representational competence skills bolster other representational competence skills. And so based on our knowledge of literature and theory, our extensive prior experience studying how students engage with representations and also current results of the studies in our group, we proposed our refined model of representational competence skills. And here is the model.

As you can see in our model, we don't position, we now. sort of differentiate between lower level foundational representational competence skills that are depicted with the red knots, and then also higher level metarepresentational competence skills that are depicted by the blue knots. And we also established the relationships between the various skills by using arrows. Because the purpose of today's presentation is not how we got to this model, I won't talk about these arrows and how we establish some of these connections. I will just give you overall sort of...

picture of what this model is communicating. And before I do that, I also want to emphasize why we think this is a valuable endeavor to do theory building work. So as Jennifer Lewis and colleagues said, the use of an established theoretical base for research has several benefits.

Most importantly, the ability to tie ideas to existing knowledge, making research more comprehensible and logical to become a more mature discipline. chemistry education researcher must continue to conduct theory-based research and eventually develop and adopt theories unique to chemistry education. And I think we're doing just that.

We're hoping, we hope that we're doing justice to what Jennifer was, you know, calling the community to do. But let's get into the model and how to make sense of this model. So as you can see, we position the use skill at the top of the model because we believe that this is the main RC skill, main representational competence skill. We believe that proficiency in using representations as tools to communicate about phenomena, visualize phenomena, predict, explain phenomena, this is what representational competence is about. And this is even actually reflected in the definition of representational competence that Cosmo and Russell offer.

They position are seen as a set of skills that allow a person to reflectively use a variety of representations to think about, communicate, and act on chemical phenomena. And also, not only, we also argue that in order to be proficient at using representations, we need to develop these other representational competence skills because some of these representational competence skills for particular tasks support students. in using representations as tools.

We also argue that in order to use representations effectively, we also need conceptual knowledge. So conceptual knowledge coupled with other representational competence skills is what enables us to use representations effectively. I'm talking quite a bit about the use skill because it's, as you can see, we're identifying it as the chief skill, so I'm unpacking it in a little more detail. But as you can see, we're also establishing two levels of the use skill.

We are differentiating between the lower level use and higher level use skill. And lower level skill is when we are asked to make a near transfer inference from a representation, such as simple structure property inference, right? We ask our students to do that all the time in our chemistry assessments.

However, there's also this higher level mental. meta-level use in which one is asked to make a far transfer inference in which we are using representations kind of like models to predict and explain phenomena. So that's the higher level of the use skill.

So now let's jump into some of the other skills in this model. Interpret skill is at the bottom of our because this is the requisite for all other representational competence skills. Essentially, if you don't know how to interpret representations, you will definitely struggle translating between representations.

You'll definitely struggle in using representations to making those higher level or low inferences. So this ability to interpret representations is fundamental to be able to complete tasks that require other representational competence skills. As you can see, and that's why all the arrows are pointing from use to the other RC skills. We also, as you can see, distinguish between two different levels of the generate skill and the lower level generate skill represents somebody being able to accurately reproduce a taught, a learned representation. So for example, to be cheeky here, I can teach representation, the reaction coordinate diagram in my classroom, and I want to expect that my students are then able to draw a correct reaction coordinate diagram for a particular reaction, right?

So that will be an example of a lower level generate skill. Higher level generate skill, the metal level generate skill, represents the ability to invent or design a new representation for a particular purpose, much like scientists do, right? So that's our differentiation there. And the last skill I will comment on, which we actually don't position as a skill.

So in Cosmo and Russell's framework, the ability to take this, to have that epistemological understanding that representations depict phenomena but are not accurate depiction of phenomena and not phenomena itself, is positioned as one of the bullet points. points. We don't think of this one as a skill. We think of it as a lens through which one views representations. So we position this as a frame or overarching perspective.

So those are fundamentals and basics when it comes to the model. And we do not presume that our refined model is perfect. This model, its birthday was June 2nd, 2022. it's uh it's this model is in its infancy um we invite researchers studying students reasoning with the presentations to participate in the model refinement process with us and to test this model in other contexts but we do believe that this model is a useful contribution to the field because it provides new ways of thinking about instruction and research and here are some examples of implications that one can draw now having this model So an implication for research is that to capture representational competence, researchers should analyze student reasoning and competence with each skill individually and collectively.

And here I will comment on kind of the state of studies in our field and beyond when it comes to representational competence and why that consensus in how we approach setting this construct is lacking. Current studies, first of all, first of all, do not focus on the meta-RC skills. So there's barely any work focusing on this side of the model.

Second, studies are designed to investigate maybe two, maximum three, RC skills. And we don't have this idea that potentially this construct is more complex. And in order to make inferences about someone's representational competence, we need to have this comprehensive approach that targets all these skills. Even when studies are designed to evaluate multiple skills like two or three fundamental these foundational lower level skills, findings are reported for maybe each skill but no effort is made to make connections about how students perform on tasks that target various skills.

So that connection building piece is also missing. Now, when it comes to implications for teaching, and this goes back to the claim that I'm making today, to support students in developing representational competence, instruction should focus not only on these lower-level foundational representational competence skills, but also on the higher-level method representational competence skills. And here, let's slow down and unpack the method representational competence skills, why I'm arguing for this so passionately.

So... The reason why mental representational skills are important is because one can learn how to interpret, translate, generate, and even use representations without understanding why they're doing it. I'm going to repeat that again to let it sink in.

A student can be very successful at interpreting or translating or generating representations without knowing why they're doing it. It might be this idea that, you know, the teacher tells me to do it, I do it. I get a good grade for it, but they have no idea why they're engaging in these tasks. And meta-representational competence is the subset of representational competence skills that allows for the reflective and purposeful use of representations. In other words, this is the, it's meta-RC is at the heart of understanding the why behind where a lot of various representations and why we're able to get proficient with all these different skills.

This SESA has a lot to say about mental representational competence skills. and he argues for the importance of this set of skills in particular. De Sessa talks about how instructions and tasks that do not make sense to students undermine their motivation to learn and persist in science because they're just doing things, they're going with the flow, they don't know why they're doing what they're doing in the classroom. And De Sessa also said that meta-RC might be precisely what makes learning representations sensible to students. So I hope that I gave you a little bit more of understanding why I'm highlighting metarepresentational competence skills here in particular.

And to provide additional clarity by what I mean by these skills. So my postdoc, Lanisha, and I, we were sitting and thinking for quite a bit about what supports currently exist out there, what tasks currently exist out there that, you know, I can showcase here in this presentation to provide more clarity. around some of these skills and we had to think pretty hard because there's not not that much out there.

If you know of things please send it my way but I will show you two example tasks that have the potential to support students in selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose and also thinking about affordances and limitations of representation. So next two slides we will go into concrete tasks. Shout out to my post-doc Lanisha. All right here is a task that has the potential to support students in selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose, so developing that type of a skill.

So this comes from the chemistry JL Gensher textbook by Gilbert, Keris, Bretz and Foster and here is a shout out to our beloved Stacey who is a co-author on this textbook. She used her CR expertise to help write this textbook. But something that is unique about this textbook is that at the end of every single chapter in this textbook, they have this visual matrix and all kinds of representations are in this visual matrix. And students are told to examine these representations and answer a set of questions.

And so so example question here, which representations depict orbital overlap or which molecules contain delocalized pi electrons? So students have to carefully attend to every single representation and think about which representations clearly communicate these ideas and which do not, and which ones they would select to answer these questions and which they will not. This is not just supporting their ability to select representations. This is also supporting their ability to use representations to make inferences. But I'm putting emphasis on select since I'm trying to find something concrete, some concrete examples for the meta-RC skills.

Another example comes from the Camp Tutor online tool developed by Martina Rao and her team. And in this tool, in this tutoring online tool, I have a screenshot where students are presented with a board monitor diagram. And they have explicit questions in which. They're asking students to look at the difference between the two different diagrams and kind of think about what one communicates and what the other communicates and then what each does not communicate.

So they have a set of questions here that push students to reflect on differences and limitations of representations, which we don't see much out there. I don't see a lot of tasks like that. Again, if you find something, please send it my way.

But here with. it's hard to read this text but the text here says the Bohr model only shows the relative energy levels of shells whereas the energy diagram shows the relative energy levels of orbitals with the green with orbitals and shells and then similar prompt here in three where again you have to compare the different the two different representations and think about what each represents and what each does not represent. Okay so I hope these examples helped.

I'm not saying that these are perfect examples. because I think, I don't know how intentionally these tools have been designed to support these particular skills, but at least we saw evidence of some kind of support around developing these skills with these tools and tasks. So again, shout out to Stacy and Martina for all these wonderful resources that they're providing students with.

Now let's go back to our claim. So I hope at this point you are with me. We went through the theory, we talked about meta-representational competence skills in particular, and I showed you some example tasks. And now let's come back to the evidence that we have from our research studies to support this claim that current instruction offers little to no support for developing students' meta-representational competence skills. And with that, I'm going to jump first in the textbook study.

We'll have a couple of slides from there, and then we will go into the faculty study. Again, just two slides from the faculty study. So in our textbook study, we picked five commonly used textbooks, organic chemistry textbooks.

And all of these textbooks, they teach organic chemistry using the functional group approach. And we were interested in how do these textbooks support students in developing representational competence skills around. commonly used representations of molecular structure.

So we have eight different representations of molecular structure and we were looking for all the pages in which these textbooks first introduce all these representations because we were interested in how are these textbooks teaching about these representations. And so therefore we found 237 pages across the five textbooks dedicated to these representations including 73 work examples and 146 practice problems. So how did What did our analysis look like? Here's an example of a passage from one of the textbooks.

So this is the McMurray textbook, specifically a work example from the McMurray textbook. And how do we call this? So in this work example, they're asking students to learn to draw the chair conformation of a substituted cyclohexane.

And so they're giving they're giving students an IUPAC formula and they're asked to draw a corresponding chair conformation. And so in coding this work example, we coded this as generate chair confirmation because obviously the task is asking students and asking them to practice drawing a chair confirmation. And then we also see that as they're drawing the chair confirmation, they're also practicing translating from this AIPAC formula to the chair confirmation. And then finally, in this work example. They're also supporting students in interpreting the Cherokee information because they're providing additional information about how to interpret this representation and also we have clear labels sort of labeling different method groups as axial tutorial providing additional support for making sense of this representation.

So essentially this passage of text we will code it as having potential to support students in interpreting, translating, engineering representations because it's engaging students in practicing these skills as they're doing this work example. So now let's see what the data looks like for the Cherokee information across the five textbooks. So here we have the Cherokee information.

Five textbooks are on top. TWP right here stands for Text, Work, Examples, and Practice Problems. And then we use the Cosmonaut and Russell framework to code what's going on in the textbook.

Something you can notice right away is that we don't even have all the skills in the framework here because we did not find, for example, evidence that these textbooks support students in practicing selecting an optimal representation for a particular purpose. So Stacy's textbook does that to some extent, these organic chemistry textbooks we found no evidence whatsoever. When we look at the data for generic information, we notice that across the five textbooks things look very similar, right?

All five textbooks very consistently teach interpret, translate, generate, and use skills. for this representation across text, work examples and practice problems very consistently. So that's an interesting observation.

Now when we look at the same analysis for dash-fetch diagrams, we see a big difference in our findings. Again, interpret, translate, generate and use are the most commonly supported skills, but things are pretty spotty. Textbooks don't consistently teach them across text, work examples and practice problems. And we don't see like some textbook support students provide more supports for this representation like McMurray and Laudan. There is way more supports across the different components of the book.

We see the Bruce completely empty. Why? Well, because dash wedge diagrams appear in Bruce and they immediately start using them without even explaining what the dashes and wedges mean. So there is no even one sentence to kind of.

let's pause and interpret what the dashes and wedges mean before we start using it. It's just, they just use it in chapter one. So maybe there's an assumption that students should know this from general chemistry, but we can see a very different picture. Something else that our team was puzzled by, if you think about which of these two representations is more commonly used in organic Imagine you all will agree with the dashed wedge diagrams and skeletal structures are two most commonly used representations of organic chemistry because once students move into reactions, that's how we represent reactions. And shirka formations, we don't use them to the same extent as dash-watch diagrams.

And somehow this representation that potentially is way more useful, there's way less support for developing these skills in context of this representation. Now this analysis here kind of focuses more on individual representations. Now let's look at the analysis where we're going to focus on individual RC skills a little, just a little more. So here we have a radar chart for just three textbooks to make things a little more simple. And this is for texts specifically, our analysis of the text in these three textbooks.

How do you interpret this radar chart? Right here we have the different RC skills and the numbers 0 through 8 represent the number of representations. So we had eight representations of molecular structure we were focusing on and so if we focus on the generate skill here, how do we interpret this? we will interpret it that Klein textbooks in the text teaches students how to generate four different representations of molecular structure. I hope that's clear and you're following.

So now we can see that McMurray and Bruce textbooks, they provide a lot of support for interpreting and translating pretty much all the representations that we were looking at in the text, but there are some gaps right here and for limitations and affordances we see. some gaps. Client is associated with more of a rounded shape meaning that they provide these supports for about half of the representations in text. Now let's compare the radar charts from worked examples and practice problems to the one that we found in text. So something that immediately stands out is complete emptiness on this side.

So students are never... asked to ever think about affordances and limitations of representations in work examples and practice problems. Essentially, they don't have opportunities, they're never encouraged to practice engaging that sort of thinking. And I also want to throw in a caveat that even when these things appeared in text, oftentimes discussion of affordances and limitations of representations look like a single sentence that can be very easily overlooked. And so overall, we can see that there is very limited support for students to develop these skills.

Something else we can also notice is that the client shape here is consistently larger than McMurray and Bruce, suggesting that the client textbook encourages students to practice developing these skills for a larger number of representations. So that's what I wanted to share with you when it comes to our textbook study. And we will jump, I have two more slides for the faculty study. We found something very similar when doing our faculty study.

So in this study we interviewed 13 chemistry professors teaching a range of chemistry courses. So organic and organic, general biochemistry, all kinds of courses. And we asked them, our interview protocol included questions such as, are there any skills that you want your students to develop when they learn about representations? Or when you introduce new representations in your course, what strategies do you use to make sure your students understand them? And how do you know that your students understand the representations that you introduce in your course?

So example interview questions. So what did we find? So here's the data from these 13 chemistry professors.

So on the y-axis we have the 13 instructors, on the x-axis we have the various RC skills, and this is what they report to teach and what they reported to assess. So as we can see a lot of the instructors talked about teaching students, interpreting, generating, and translating the representations. And some also talked about assessing some of these skills, specifically, a lot talked about assessing student ability to generate representations in their assessments.

And here are some example quotes to kind of show you where, how we got, how we, how this data came, where it came from. So here's a quote from a biochemistry instructor who said, sometimes the students are interpreting their representation on their own first, and then we're talking about it. So that is a common group question that I do where they might see a new representation like a new metabolic pathway or a movie of ATP synthase.

So obviously, the instructor clearly used the word interpreting, so it makes our coding so straightforward. But this is sort of them describing what they're doing in that classroom. Now, another example of when they talk about their assessments. So an organic chemistry professor said, on exams, we have questions explicitly.

about representations which would just be sort of converting from one to another. So they didn't use the word translate which we didn't expect them to but obviously they're talking about the translate skill. which early on in the course are more appropriate because that's actually the skill we're trying to develop, you know, how to convey chemical structure to different sorts of representations.

But then we also see that there's very little discussion happening around some of these skills and we found some quotes that suggested to us that some instructors teach RC skills without even realizing it. And so here are some example quotes that kind of depict that. So participant seven said I don't aim to develop any skills I just think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding.

Participant ten said I guess I don't think about representations that much when I teach my course and participant five said this is the first time I'm really thinking about teaching about representations I just sort of I just do it. So that's those are some of the findings from our faculty study and overall we can see that there are some consistent findings. from our textbook and faculty studies, we can see that both textbooks and faculty, they support, they provide some supports for interpreting, generating, translating, and using representations. There are very limited support for understanding affordances and limitations of representations, and we found no evidence for some of the other RC skills. So now let's go back to our claim, so our claim and emerging implications from this claim.

So as we can see, current instruction offers little to no support for developing metarepresentational competence skills. And so one implication that obviously we will offer to instructors is that instructors need to prioritize not only the lower level foundational RC skills, but also the higher level meta RC skills. Now having said that, I want to emphasize that this responsibility does not lie only on the instructors.

We as a research community now need to support instructors in helping develop their students' RC. And two things that we could do is to design, develop, and evaluate classroom-ready formative tasks, activities, and assessments that are shown, that are tested, and show that they support students in developing these RC skills effectively. And also we can be thinking about designing, facilitating, and evaluating various professional development activities for faculty when it comes to teaching about representations.

And with that, This is a picture, kind of an outdated picture, actually, of my research group. And contact information on the bottom. And a QR code that you can scan to get to the website of my research group. And I will take any questions that you have.

Thank you so much for your attention. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that.

So let's do questions. I guess there's a few ways we can do this. So if you want to raise your hand, I can kind of call on y'all in order and unmute you.

If you want to post them in the chat, I can ask them or you can just ask them in the chat. Whatever feels good. Take it away. I will start calling on people.

OK, I'm joking. Rebecca, start us off. I just have a clarification question real quick because I'm thinking a whole bunch about what you just said, which was fascinating. But with the textbook, when they were talking about the dash-fudge diagrams, there was no discussion even in the text about the limitations of using that and all of the information it doesn't tell us?

Nope, nope. There's really very little discussion about that, which is why we also believe that potentially instructors are not doing the same, which we found very limited evidence of that when instructors were discussing what they're doing. There's some research out there that shows that instructors use textbooks as a curriculum pretty much.

And they sort of stick to the way textbooks explain things. They just stick to that by using the slides from the publisher. And so given that textbooks don't communicate these ideas, you know, you get those slides and you're not going to talk about those either.

So yeah, there's very little of that in textbooks. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that question.

So we've got some spicy ones in the chat. Were there any differences between instructors use of RC skills if they primarily taught graduate level courses versus introductory courses? That's a great question.

I don't have the answer to that question because our sample size was pretty small for that study 13 instructors. So we were looking at various patterns but again I cannot make strong claims about that. We did see some differences in faculty discussion about the challenges that they encounter when it comes to teaching with representations depending on the course that they taught.

So something that caught my eye that was very interesting was conversations I had with analytical chemists. Analytical chemists talked about how their job teaching with representations is actually difficult because in their courses, not only they have to teach about various sort of diagrams of instruments, they also need to talk a lot about various statistical representations. And they kind of discussed this idea that, look, I'm a chemist, I am not, you know, I'm not a statistician.

So they found it challenging that they had to navigate this variety of representations and do a good job teaching them. So there were some conversations that were unique to the subject you teach but I cannot make claims about those differences like that. All right I'm gonna keep on with Molly's questions for a second. So based on the textbook project have the results of this study impacted thoughts on textbook use?

I think so. Well I stopped I converted to using client textbook but not only for the this reason obviously I want to preface every single study I showed you today is extremely limited, right? Even the textbook study alone, we are only looking at those eight representations of molecular structure. We are looking at how they're supporting RC scales, but textbooks are so much more than just that, right?

There's so much more packed in textbooks. So there are multiple reasons why we switched to CLIMB, but definitely those analysis kind of helped with that. So, yeah.

Okay, and then Stephanie has some kind of big questions. So is representational competence being used in other disciplines? And if so, how so? Very similarly to what we do in chemistry, except for this framework is just adopted in the context of other disciplinary representations, so in physics and biology.

So any deeper field, other researchers are also focusing on representations and supporting students learning about it. representations supporting students drawing representations there's like a very broad literature base about drawing to learn that comes from other disciplines like biology for example i would say that chemistry is a bit unique in this sense and i think you know i have a sense i have a feeling that in chemistry we focus on representations way more than other different disciplines just because that idea that representations are a language of chemistry and we need to depict this sub-microscopic phenomenon that is invisible and macroscopic phenomenon you So we're definitely in chemistry talking about the invisible, which is how else do you talk about it? But really, it's used across all deeper disciplines. I don't know if I answered that question, but I think that's what it was getting at. I'm going to invite Vicente to hop in here.

Sure. Maya, thank you for your webinar. I was curious about your ideas.

When you talk about representation, presentations, in a certain way, your model is quite general. It doesn't speak to the level of conceptual understanding in chemistry that is needed to interpret each of the different representations that we use. So concerning these questions about biology and things like that, I always wonder how easy it would be to transfer the skills.

within chemistry and across disciplines. It's just because you become very good at dealing with one type of representation, is that going to translate in your ability to deal with other representations within chemistry and other disciplines? So I'm kind of wondering to what extent it's an impossible dream to develop representational competency when it seems to be so tied to...

the specific nature of the representation. And the second thing that I wanted you to comment is that in the same way that I think that we sometimes try to teach too much in chemistry in terms of concepts and ideas, are we not trying to teach too many representations for the kinds of things that the students can handle? I'm trying to take notes because there's a lot. So you might need to remind me of all the different aspects that you brought up with your questions.

Let me start with the latter one and we'll jump in the first one. So are we teaching too much? I think so. As I was saying with the textbook study, for example, somehow things like human projections and character combinations, there's like tons of pages of textbooks dedicated to these presentations.

Yet for the rest of the curriculum, we use them rarely. Maybe like when we're thinking about elimination reactions and they don't really appear in organic chemistry 2 or... really rarely.

And so the question is, is it worth it putting students through like a whole week of instruction and making sure that they... I don't know. It's for the organic chemistry community to think about, but that is a thing that came out of that study that we can all think about. Are we teaching too much? Potentially.

And now I'm advocating, yes, we need to teach DRC skills properly too, right? But the thing is that we are already teaching about representation, so we might as well teach better if we can, right? And I think also when we teach about representations as instructors, it's also about, I don't think it should take that much time. to embed in your instruction messages about affordances and limitations of representations, messages about modeling, epistemological messages about why we use representations and why we learn all these skills. But if done consistently and intentionally, if these messages are sprinkled out, I think that can help students have this higher awareness about all these skills.

So that's one point. Now, Vicente had way more. Another question Vicente had was about how transferable this model could be for other contexts. And I think we've thought about that quite a bit.

So I, as you all know, in grad school, I looked at reaction point diagrams and reactions, other sets of representations. Lanisha, my postdoc, she looked at various representations of spectra, IR spectra. spectroscopy and MR spectroscopy so that's something she she did uh when she was doing her PhD and we both thought quite a bit about how this model translates into designing studies for these other representations that we've studied in the past and how if we had this model perhaps our studies would have been even more thought-provoking and we would have learned more and I believe that they translate I feel like this can this question can take like me talking for 30 minutes while providing complete examples so I If you all want to have a conversation, I'm happy to jump on Zoom anytime and kind of brainstorm that. But I do believe that the model is transferable to other contexts.

There was another thing that set the bread up, which was about conceptual understanding in relationship to representational competence. And that is absolutely true. There is that important connection.

And but... When Vicente brought that question, you specifically emphasized the interpretation of representation. In our group, we are kind of differentiating between like two different knowledge bases almost. There is knowledge base of understanding the representation itself and how to interpret the various features of that representation.

But when it comes to, so for the interpreting representations, you do need to know concepts. So, for example, if you're looking at a structure, you need to identify a chiral center. You obviously need to know what a chiral center is, but you need to know what features of the representation to attempt to identify the chiral center. But for higher level youth skill, not only you need that sort of knowledge about the representation and the features and how to interpret and what they mean. Now you're pulling in from other conceptual information to make those higher level inferences.

Even sometimes inferences, lower level inferences about structured property relationship. push the learner to not only consider their knowledge of the representation but also pull this additional knowledge based on what you are making the inference so it's quite complex yes and we have a lot of unpacking to do and maybe there was something else in this question that i don't remember i want to actually hop in and tie back to stephanie's question let's say the learner does this and they develop this awesome representational competence in chemistry, what can they then go on and do with it? Can they go into other classes and use it? So representational competence is similar to conceptual knowledge in the sense that you can be competent with one representation and not so much with the other, right? Just like with conceptual understanding, you can be proficient with one topic.

You are really good at understanding equilibrium, but not so good at thermodynamics or acid base or... I don't know, quantum chemistry or something, right? So similar to that, with RC, you can be really good with one set of representations and not so much with others. So when you say you're developing this awesome RC in chemistry, I will put a caveat that yes, but that might still mean that you are better with some representations than others.

And then what you can do with it, I think that we kind of... I kind of positioned with the model this idea that there are different levels to the use skill, there are different levels to the generate skill, that if you have that basic use, basic generate proficiency, hopefully you're able to then move to those more sophisticated ways in which we're using representations or you're able to generate a novel representation. So very much like, you know, like modeling the scientific practices, you engage in that, you are more prepared to engage in that practice. Obviously, you cannot go from zero to 100. We need to scaffold how we get there. We need to start with simpler tasks and then get to those more complicated tasks.

But building those foundational RC skills enables us to then be more proficient with higher level things like using representations to predict and explain phenomena. Okay, since that's Ryan Schtick, I'm going to invite him to weigh in here. I have a schtick. That's cool. Hi, Maya.

Hey there. I'm curious as to your thoughts on what a chemistry course, we can make it an organic chemistry course because that'll be more intelligible to me, would look like that really signals to students that the point of representations is to simplify systems to predict and explain. Because when I think about, you know, like our first semester, we do the RS like stereochemistry thing that everybody does. It's not clear to me as the instructor why people are doing it apart from like it's a skill that they have to trot through. And in most courses I've ever seen, certainly in the introductory sort of organic sequence, we talk briefly about chiral environments, say thalidomide was bad.

Now let's assign RNS for like three days. And then, you know, maybe we have people draw mixtures of stereoisomers for a variety of reactions the rest of the semester. So I think like our status quo doesn't do. what it would need to to signal to students that the point of representations is to simplify systems to explain. So what would a course look like that would message something different than the course I just described, than our course here at UW, than I think most organic courses?

I don't think I'm going to say something unique or really novel here. I think potentially for your particular question, it's about connecting these representations and these concepts to real world phenomena. where they are used.

So in your example with RS, right, it's not only teaching students about, you know, getting them through dozens of tasks where they practice and practice and practice correctly doing that, but it's also having conversations again about applicability of these ideas and that the fact that, you know, chemistry of our bodies is controlled by chiral molecules and that that's how the... principles of drug design are really much related to thinking about chirality and thinking about connecting it to biochemistry and thinking about how the proteins in our body are made of amino acids and nitrogen of 20 are chiral and again connecting it back to that drug design so that hopefully provides a context for why are we practicing doing this skill why is it important to identify rns non-tumors why are we working with a representation that allows us to distinguish between those two enantiomers. So I think potentially connecting it to real world applications and phenomena is the way to go.

What do you think, Ryan? I keep wondering what is students' role in making those connections? Because, you know, I do all that. I've even brought in you know, limonene and antimers or whatever.

And everyone goes, oh, they smell different. Oh, my receptors in my nose must be chiral, see glove analogy. But the work that they're actually doing, the things they get credit for, and most examples I've seen here and elsewhere of assigning absolute configuration, it's just the skill, right?

Did I assign RRS right? Did I do the thing that ChemDraw could do with a button press? And so I... strongly suspect that we haven't looked at this skill in particular. We've looked at others that students see the point of the skill as placing the teacher, jump through the hoop and moving on with their life.

And that's not great. I mean, if that is true, like if all we really do with this is assign R and S, tell them thalidomide's bad, from their perspective, it's a random skill that has no purpose. And then they move on, then why do we do it at all? So I guess like, would we want to move phenomena to the center and then think about...

phenomena that would require you to grapple with handedness to understand. And then if you need to then talk about handed things, you would have to call them something distinct from each other. Yes, which is where, again, I want to circle back to that idea that we talk a lot about what the learning environment should look like, what instructors should do, but it's really our responsibility as researchers to design these tasks that put phenomena at the center, to design the tasks that push students to.

you know, think about why we're using representation. So I think it's also our responsibility to really support instructors in creating those learning environments where that's even possible. Because again, you cannot go from zero to a hundred and reinvent your entire course without having proper resources and support. So yes, I do.

A lot of work needs to be done to make that happen for sure. Yeah, job security. Yay, anyone else?

I don't know if I missed something in the chat or not. I don't think so. Can I throw back to one of the quotes from one of the polymer chemists that you interviewed who said that they've always just thought about representations as tool?

Yes. And what's an RC activist's take on that? Is it aligned or misaligned? I'm going to read the quote again.

Okay. I don't aim to develop any skills. I just think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding.

In my mind, they're actually talking about the same thing I am talking about. They just don't recognize that as something important. So when they're saying they think of representations as tools to our conceptual understanding, in my mind, yes, that's what you do. You use representations as effective tools to explain phenomena, visualize phenomena.

That's great. Except for this. This instructor does not recognize that in itself as something that students need potential support with.

They're kind of flipping the conversation on only concepts matter. My job is to teach them concepts and they need to have a solid conceptual understanding. They're not thinking through the fact that in order to develop a conceptual understanding, we use representations to get there. And we just tacitly assume that students are...

you know, proficient with representations and we can just focus on concepts. So that's kind of the conversation I had with this particular instructor. So I think he was actually talking about RC without realizing what he's talking about and how why that's important.

But good I, Alina. I find that quote also very intriguing. It's a complex one.

Can we get a final? spiciest question does anyone want to close this out you put pressure on everybody now people are like oh no is my question the spiciest if not oh no okay risa oh that's what i needed love it so i don't feel like my question is very spicy but uh here it goes um when you described kazma and russell my experience with um you with them is primarily through visualization. And I feel like a lot of like what their work was built upon was Johnstone's triangle.

And, and it sounds, and also kind of cognition at that time. And I find it really interesting that you're merging epistemology, yet I don't quite hear the epistemology as much, like, even though I saw it in your slide. And the reason I say that is because at times it sounds to me. a little bit like you're kind of, I think, describing that students can't, or they're limited in their ability to use representations. And I don't think epistemology would maybe go there.

And I guess I'm struggling with that in kind of, you know, taking in the framework, because I feel like epistemology looks at the resources that students can access. And and do access and sometimes incorrectly. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that aspect. One, why a visualization framework that I think was really looking, and I wonder, I mean, it really did, I think they focused a lot on atomic level animations at that time. I know Russell, I remember at a Gordon conference actually presenting several animations or visualizations that kind of blended the three levels.

And he was really proud of the fact that... that in with Johnstone's triangle in mind, it seemed to do all of that in one kind of tool. And so I know that that's where they were headed.

So I guess, anyway, I don't know if I'm making sense, but I guess I'm, I'm really curious as to that blend between epistemology and a visualization framework. And I guess I would, yeah, I'll, I'll leave it there. I'm rambling. So I love your question.

Thank you so much. That is, I feel like that was pretty spicy. So I I feel like you do. Now, when it comes to epistemology, so the model is already getting pretty complex. So I don't know how much we can add to it.

without it completely not making sense anymore because if you think of it that way then you know we should be also connecting it to conceptual knowledge we should be connecting it to um you know spatial ability and epistemology like there's there's so like everything is so interrelated all the theories are so interrelated that you know you could be building this whole network uh and uh i think in order for this thing to make sense and have uh utility it has to be confined at some extent, but then nothing stops us to combine frameworks. This is where I am right now. You might talk to me in a year and I might change my mind because we're looking at studies and but in fact my graduate student Frida, who is here, shout out to Frida, she is doing a study in which she's looking at how students make inferences from representations of molecular structure about stability and she is combining this RC perspective. with resources perspective.

She is looking at what resources are students activating, they are asked to make these inferences and interestingly something that Freire is finding that once students attend to Lewis structure they attend to every single feature to make inference. Loan payers, bonds, electrons, the atoms themselves, like everything. From everything in that representation people can make inference apparently. That's interesting.

So we are combining these perspectives, but we use them as, right now, separate frameworks, and we draw from both of those frameworks in our analyses. We also draw a lot from reasoning literature, from dissenters' work. So we are essentially combining a lot of theory to inform our work. I hope that answers your question, Risa.

Thanks. I think on that note, we're going to call it. Can we thank our speaker one more time?

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It was nice hanging out with you all on this Tuesday evening.

Thank you. And we'll post the recording of this so that folks can get all the resources that were in it. Thank you.

Perfect. All right. Nice seeing everyone.

Thank you, Maya. Thank you. all right what do we do now nothing that's it let me stop the recording perfect

Transcript for:Exploring Representational Competence in Chemistry

Transcript for:
Exploring Representational Competence in Chemistry