Organic chemistry students struggle with understanding the energetics of chemical reactions. Reaction coordinate diagrams are one tool that is widely used in organic chemistry classrooms to assist students with visualizing and explaining the energy changes that take place throughout a reaction. Thirty-six students enrolled in organic chemistry II participated in a qualitative study that used semi-structured interviews to investigate the extent to which students meaningfully extract and integrate information encoded in reaction coordinate diagrams. Results show that students have difficulties explaining the meanings of surface features such as peaks, valleys, peak height, and peak width. Analysis of students’ explanations resulted in four themes that describe students’ challenges with correctly interpreting the features of reaction coordinate diagrams. Students conflated transition states and intermediates, despite being able to recite definitions. Students described the chemical species encoded at points along the x-axis of the reaction coordinate diagrams, while largely ignoring the energies of the species encoded along the y-axis. Implications for teaching organic chemistry are discussed.

中文翻译：

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有机化学学生对反应坐标图的表面特征的解释

有机化学专业的学生努力地理解化学反应的能量学。反应坐标图是有机化学课堂中广泛使用的一种工具，可以帮助学生可视化和解释整个反应过程中发生的能量变化。参加有机化学II课程的36名学生参加了定性研究，该研究使用半结构化访谈来调查学生有意义地提取和整合反应坐标图中编码信息的程度。结果表明，学生很难解释诸如峰，谷，峰高和峰宽之类的表面特征的含义。通过对学生的解释进行分析，得出了四个主题，这些主题通过正确地解释反应坐标图的特征来描述学生的挑战。学生尽管能够背诵定义，但仍将过渡状态和中间体混为一谈。学生描述了沿反应坐标图的x轴，而很大程度上忽略了沿y轴编码的物质的能量。讨论了对有机化学教学的启示。