The abstract nature of bonding poses several challenges as some students struggle to identify the ionic and covalent nature of bonds within a variety of compounds. The topic is formally introduced in both middle school and secondary education (grades 6-12) and reintroduced in the undergraduate general chemistry curriculum. Teachers use multiple representations to communicate the concepts of bonding, including Lewis Structures, formulas, spacefilling models, and 3D manipulatives. As students learn to interpret these multiple representations, they may develop misconceptions that can create a problem in further learning of chemistry. Therefore, representations of chemical structures are useful to elicit student ideas of chemical bonding by interviewing students about the features of the models as they pertain to bonding.
Students enrolled in high school physical science, high school chemistry, and general chemistry were interviewed using a five-phase semi-structured protocol focused on multiple representations to explore students’ ideas about covalent and ionic bonding. Four themes emerged through constant comparative analysis for describing bond type: periodic trends, electrostatic interactions, octet rule, and representation surface features. The qualitative findings were used to develop the Bonding Representations Inventory (BRI) to determine the prevalence of the misconceptions. The BRI was administered to 1072 high school chemistry, advanced placement chemistry, and general chemistry students across the United States. Content validity was determined through expert validation of the items, and concurrent validity was established with the three groups of students. Reliability was determined through individual item analysis and through Ferguson’s δ. The BRI can be used in high school and general chemistry classrooms to inform teaching of both bonding and representations.
Additional research was conducted in inorganic chemistry education (Appendix A): Creating an Inorganic Symmetry POGIL Activity. Many students struggle when mentally rotating and visualizing three dimensional structures. This skill is important for learning symmetry, which is foundational for other topics in inorganic chemistry. Process-oriented, guided-inquiry learning (POGIL) was used to structure the activity using a learning cycle paradigm and consistent with Novak’s human constructivism theory. The activity was tested in an Inorganic course at Miami University and published in the Journal of Chemical Education (Luxford, Crowder, & Bretz, 2012).