How ordering concrete and abstract representations in intermolecular force chemistry tasks influences students’ thought processes on the location of dipole–dipole interactions

Representations in chemistry are the tools by which students, instructors, and chemists reason with chemical concepts that are abstract. Although representations are regularly used within the chemistry classroom, there is more to uncover regarding the ways students interact with representations when given chemistry tasks. This study aimed to address this gap in knowledge. In this study, eighteen students enrolled in second semester general chemistry were recruited for data collection. Semi-structured interviews were utilized to observe how students approached a similar set of dipole–dipole interaction tasks when given four distinct representations. Analysis of the data revealed that students’ approaches to these tasks were affected by the newly explicit features present within each representation. Additionally, the ordering in which the representations were presented to the students influenced the specific features students took notice of and implemented into their approaches to the tasks. These findings can better inform instruction and future research involving chemical representations such that students will form a solid foundation in working with and pulling relevant information from various representations when solving chemistry tasks.