Students’ mental models of chemical reactions

Chemical Phenomena versus Chemical Reactions: Do Students Make the Connection?

In this work, we examine whether tenth-grade high school students (N = 197, age 1516) as well as first-year university chemistry students (N = 77, age 18-19) can make the connection between chemical reactions and chemical phenomena. We used nineteen physical and chemical phenomena, and asked the students at one stage to distinguish physical from chemical phenomena, and at another stage to state...

Deterministic Models of the Simplest Chemical Reactions

We present a general mathematical framework for constructing deterministic models of simple chemical reactions. In such a model, an underlying dynamical system drives a process in which a particle undergoes a reaction (changes color) when it enters a certain subset (the catalytic site) of the phase space and (possibly) some other conditions are satisfied. The framework we suggest allows us to d...

Models of Oscillating Chemical Reactions. Particularities of Some Proposed Models for the Characterization of Chemical Oscillations

How Do Students Reason About Chemical Substances and Reactions?

One of the central learning goals in chemistry teaching is to help students understand the relationship between the macroscopic properties of substances and their chemical composition and structure at the submicroscopic level (AAAS 1993; NRC 1996). In particular, we would like students to meaningfully understand how to use atomic– molecular models of matter to explain and predict the properties...

System representation of stochastic models of first-order chemical reactions

A new approach for the computation of probability distributions of molecule populations for coupled first-order chemical reactions is introduced. The approach is based on system theory, where the system states are type of molecules (molecule species) and the signals are probabilities. The transfer functions of the defined systems can be applied to both closed and open reaction systems. The use ...