The seminar of the Summer Semester of 2018-2019 will be given by Prof. Resa Kelly, from San Jose State University. The title of her talk is “Exploring the Use of Conflicting Chemistry Animations with General Chemistry Students”.

The use of animations and visualizations to explore the atomic level has repeatedly been reported to be an effective method for helping students make sense of atomic level reaction events. In spite of research that has communicated that students need assistance to develop their conceptual understanding of matter, instruction continues to focus on the macroscopic and symbolic levels of chemistry making it challenging for students to develop their mental model of atomic level events and to learn how to critique atomic level models. 
In an effort to help students learn to critique animations rather than simply accept them as “truth” my research team has begun to explore the use of presenting conflicting animations that require students to reason about the animation’s fit with experimental evidence to determine its scientific accuracy. This exercise has revealed that classically trained students often relied heavily on predicting precipitate formation from solubility rules rather than on information gleaned from experimental information of the reaction events. Inspired by this challenge, our group is exploring a method for scaffolding the introduction of wrong animation models prior to being presented with conflicting animation models. In this talk, I will share an overview of the work we have done with conflicting animations and scaffolds that we have implemented in our quest to best empower students to become critical consumers of dynamic chemistry models.