Thermodynamics and kinetics are key topics in the chemistry curriculum that pose challenges to students across a range of educational levels. These struggles arise from the complexity and mixed representations inherent to the topics. Additionally, while thermodynamics and kinetics are related, students struggle to make conceptually correct connections, sometimes seeing them as two separate topics with no relation and other times conflating their meanings and explanatory powers. Herein we captured student conceptions about thermodynamics and kinetics through a Writing-to-Learn activity that utilized peer review and revision to engage students with the concepts by applying them to a real-world context. This study identified whether students focused on the concepts targeted by the assignment and characterized the chemistry content of the peer review feedback. Students’ descriptions of thermodynamics and kinetics content, as well as the relationship between the two and how they connect to the application given in the assignment, improved during the process and suggests that peer review and revision played an important role in supporting students to describe these concepts. When guided by a content-focused peer review rubric, students provided constructive chemistry content-directed feedback. Specifically, analysis of student writing and comments demonstrated the potential of the assignment to engage students in building connections between complexly related topics, including distinguishing between sponteneity and rate and appropriately relating activation energy and rate. Findings from this study suggest that writing can be used to elicit student-specific conceptions of physical chemistry topics and develop students’ explanatory skills of chemistry content even without direct instructor feedback.

中文翻译：

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使用写作捕捉学生的热力学和动力学概念

热力学和动力学是化学课程中的关键主题，它对各种教育水平的学生构成挑战。这些斗争源于主题固有的复杂性和混合表示。此外，尽管热力学和动力学是相关的，但学生仍在努力建立概念上正确的联系，有时将它们视为两个没有关系的独立主题，而其他时候则将其含义和解释能力混为一谈。在这里，我们通过“写作到学习”活动捕获了学生关于热力学和动力学的概念，该活动利用同行评议和修订，通过将学生应用到现实世界中来使他们参与其中。这项研究确定了学生是否专注于作业所针对的概念，并表征了同行评议反馈的化学内容。学生对热力学和动力学内容的描述，以及两者之间的关系以及他们如何与作业中给出的应用程序建立联系，在此过程中有所改善，并表明同review审查和修订在支持学生描述这些内容方面发挥了重要作用概念。在以内容为中心的同行评议准则的指导下，学生提供了建设性的化学内容导向的反馈。具体来说，对学生写作和评论的分析表明了作业的潜力，可以促使学生建立复杂相关主题之间的联系，包括区分自发性和速率，并适当关联活化能和速率。这项研究的结果表明，即使没有教师的直接反馈，写作也可以用来引发学生对物理化学主题的特定构想，并发展学生对化学内容的解释能力。