Date of Award

2026-05-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Chemistry

Advisor(s)

Elizabeth Day

Abstract

Understanding how students conceptualize entropy remains a central challenge in chemistry education. Often referred to as a "driving force" of chemical reactions, the dispersal of energy as a process proceeds is indicative of a process's spontaneity or thermodynamic favorability. Students frequently default to discussing phenomena in deterministic terms, potentially reflecting the language choice and heuristics selected by the instructor such as "disorder". In this study, assessment prompts about entropy from a convenience sample of general chemistry textbooks were characterized as to their potential to elicit three-dimensional learning, and students' responses to assessment prompts from a curriculum aligned with three-dimensional learning were qualitatively coded for themes in students' ideas about entropy. With strong agreement, two independent coders found that all but 2 assessment prompts fell short of the standard of eliciting three-dimensional learning. This represents patterns of communication from chemistry experts that entropy is an algorithmic exercise, not a generative core idea for explaining chemistry phenomena. From a transformed general chemistry course, a sampling of students; responses to entropy assessments demonstrates that students reason about energy as a substance, not a state function, and that students were able to leverage an activity about possible arrangements of energy in a variety of productive ways. The implications of this work for research are an analysis of the linguistic, cultural, and substantive patterns paired with the activation of students' cognitive resources provides a more comprehensive picture of the ways in which entropy is modeled and assessed.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

68 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Raymundo Aragonez

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Chemistry Commons

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