Students’ Concept-Building Approaches: A Novel Predictor of Success in Chemistry Courses

Abstract

One primary goal of many science courses is for students to learn creative problem-solving skills; that is, integrating concepts, explaining concepts in a problem context, and using concepts to solve problems. However, what science instructors see is that many students, even those having excellent SAT/ACT and Advanced Placement scores, struggle in the introductory science courses. As faculty work to adopt more evidence-based teaching methods, the question arises of how to determine early on who may have difficulty in these introductory courses. Recent basic cognitive science research suggests that there are individual differences in how learners approach conceptual tasks: some learners tend toward rote concept-learning (exemplar learners), whereas other learners tend to use abstraction concept-learning. We explored the possibility that this individual difference in concept-building might have consequences for classroom learning. In the current study, using an online concept-building task, we differentiate...