About the Seminar:
A significant body of research is focused on student understanding of chemical concepts, particularly in general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry. Few investigations have focused on more advanced courses. As part of the VIPEr Fellows project to study foundation-level inorganic chemistry courses, faculty from eighteen institutions used a series of open-ended questions designed to elicit students’ conceptions of chemical bonding in molecules or conductivity in solids. An open-coding process was used to develop code categories; student responses were analyzed according to these codes. This talk will review what is known of students’ understanding about these ideas and report ideas about how students interpret molecular orbital diagrams, describe bonding, discuss the electronic properties of solids, and representations in bonding in molecular and extended systems. The results of these studies can be used to inform the teaching of these topics.
About the Speaker:
Barbara Reisner is an inorganic chemist who explores questions in inorganic chemistry and chemistry education. She is currently a Professor of Chemistry at James Madison University where she has worked with 40 undergraduate research students. Her undergraduate research team studies coordination complexes and metal organic frameworks derived from imidazolylborate ligands. She investigates the interface of chemistry education research and practice by studying how we can use student conceptions to improve teaching.
Barb received her A.B. (1993) in Chemistry from Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. (1998) from the University of California, Berkeley with Professor Angelica Stacy. She was a joint postdoctoral researcher with John Parise (SUNY Stony Brook) and Brian Toby (NIST). Barb is a leader in the inorganic community called IONiC (www.ionicviper.org). She currently serves on the ACS Committee on Professional Training and is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society. Barb loves living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and enjoys spending time with her family, reading, cooking, and singing.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/94953422094?pwd=YThIQkpwaXFsRm1CK2hBS0hEejRYZz09
Meeting ID: 949 5342 2094
Passcode: 222903400
