Research in the past decades repeatedly revealed university students’ struggles to properly understand physical chemistry concepts. In contrast to school, tertiary teaching relies heavily on the symbolic level, mainly applying abstract representations such as equations and diagrams. To follow the lessons and generate conceptual understanding, students need to connect those representations with macroscopic and submicroscopic aspects of the scientific concept depicted. For German first-year chemistry students, this increase in abstraction in a major subject of study contributes to excessive demand and demotivation (especially during out-of-class learning) and increases the risk of early dropouts. We designed a simulation-based learning environment (BIRC: Bridging Imagination and Representation in Chemistry) to suit the needs of first-year students and support them when learning physical chemistry at home. Our approach, featuring molecular dynamics simulations, requires students to assess their own mental models on the submicroscopic level and connect them to equations and diagrams on the symbolic level. Prior studies did already highlight the potential of individual BIRC learning units to foster conceptual understanding on specific topics. In this paper, we investigate if and how students of a broader sample use these learning activities as voluntary supplement beside regular coursework. During the term, we used think-aloud protocols, interviews and eight online questionnaires to analyse students’ mental and emotional interaction while working on BIRC, assessing whether students perceived BIRC as a suitable, enjoyable and supportive resource to enhance learning. Via two paper & pencil achievement tests we examined students’ retention concerning submicroscopic mental models and their ability to connect these mental models with symbolic representations 5–10 weeks later. Our findings indicate a cognitively engaging, comparably enjoyable learning process, which strengthens conceptual understanding and – despite the necessary time and effort – induces a broad number of students to voluntarily work on several units at home.

中文翻译：

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将物理化学的亚微观和符号水平联系起来：基于模拟的自愿学习活动如何促进大一学生的概念理解

过去几十年的研究反复揭示了大学生为正确理解物理化学概念所做的努力。与学校相反，高等教学在很大程度上依赖于符号级别，主要采用等式和图表等抽象表示形式。要学习这些课程并产生概念性理解，学生需要将这些表示形式与所描绘的科学概念的宏观和亚微观方面联系起来。对于德国一年级化学专业的学生来说，这一主要研究主题的抽象程度的增加会导致过度的需求和动力（尤其是在课外学习期间），并增加了提前辍学的风险。我们设计了一个基于模拟的学习环境（BIRC：衔接化学中的想象力和表示法，以适应一年级学生的需求，并支持他们在家学习物理化学。我们的方法以分子动力学模拟为特色，要求学生在亚微观水平上评估自己的心理模型，并将其与符号水平上的方程式和图表联系起来。先前的研究确实已经突出了各个BIRC学习单元促进对特定主题进行概念理解的潜力。在本文中，我们调查了样本量较大的学生是否以及如何将这些学习活动作为除常规课程之外的自愿补充。在本学期中，我们使用了思考协议，访谈和八份在线问卷来分析学生在进行BIRC时的心理和情感互动，通过两次纸笔成就测试，我们检查了学生对亚微观心理模型的保留程度，以及他们在5-10周后将这些心理模型与符号表示联系起来的能力。我们的发现表明，在认知上具有吸引力，相对愉快的学习过程可以增强概念性理解，并且尽管有必要的时间和精力，但仍可以诱使大量学生自愿在家中的多个单元工作。