Evaluating the Effectiveness of Organic Chemistry Textbooks for Promoting Representational Competence

The goal of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of organic chemistry textbooks in developing student representational competence skills with eight representations of molecular structure (Lewis structures, Kekulé structures, condensed structures, electrostatic potential maps, skeletal structures, dash–wedge diagrams, Newman projections, and chair conformations). Five commonly used organic chemistry textbooks in the United States were deductively coded with Kozma and Russell’s representational competence framework. The analyses focused on identifying representational competence skills that are taught for each type of representation, as well as how consistently these skills are taught across text, worked examples, and practice problems within each textbook. We found that more representational competence skills are taught for some representations rather than others. In addition, all five textbooks may promote foundational representational competence skills, such as the ability to interpret, translate, and generate representations, but may fail to support learners in developing higher-level metarepresentational skills. Generally, more skills are taught in text, in comparison to the number of skills that are scaffolded in worked examples and assessed in practice problems. This means that the textbooks introduce various skills but do not provide as much support for students to develop and practice these skills. Finally, worked examples of some textbooks provide much more scaffolded explanations than others, allowing for a different amount of skill-building support.