Visualizations and visual models are of substantial importance for science learning (Harrison and Treagust, 2000), and it seems impossible to study chemistry without visualizations. More specifically, the combination of visualizations with text is especially beneficial for learning when dual coding is fostered (Mayer, 2014). However, at the same time, comprehending the visualizations and visual models appears to be rather difficult for learners (e.g., Johnstone, 2000). This may be one reason for the difficulties students experience especially during the university entry phase, which in a worst-case-scenario can result in high university drop-out rates as they are currently found in science-related study courses (Chen, 2013). In this regard, our study investigates, how the ability to handle and learn with visualizations – which we call visual model comprehension – relates to academic success at the beginning of chemistry studies. To do so, we collected the data of 275 chemistry-freshmen during their first university year. Our results show that visual model comprehension is a key factor for students to be successful in chemistry courses. For instance, visual model comprehension is able to predict exam grades in introductory chemistry courses as well as general chemistry content knowledge. Furthermore, our analyses point out that visual model comprehension acts as a mediator for the relation between prior knowledge and (acquired) content knowledge in chemistry studies. Given this obvious importance of visual model comprehension, our findings could give valuable insights regarding approaches to foster chemistry comprehension and learning especially for students at the beginning of their academic career.

中文翻译：

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你看到的是你学到的东西？视觉模型理解在化学领域的学术成功中的作用

可视化和可视化模型对于科学学习非常重要（Harrison和Treagust，2000），如果没有可视化，似乎不可能研究化学。更具体地讲，可视化与文本的结合对于促进双重编码的学习特别有益（Mayer，2014）。但是，与此同时，理解可视化和视觉模型对于学习者来说似乎相当困难（例如，，约翰斯通（2000）。这可能是造成学生尤其在大学入学阶段遇到困难的原因之一，在最坏的情况下，这可能导致大学辍学率很高，因为他们目前在与科学相关的学习课程中被发现（Chen，2013） 。在这方面，我们的研究调查了可视化处理和学习的能力（我们称为视觉模型理解）如何与化学研究开始时的学术成功相关。为此，我们收集了275名化学新人在其大学第一年的数据。我们的结果表明，视觉模型理解是学生在化学课程中取得成功的关键因素。例如，视觉模型理解能够预测化学入门课程的考试成绩以及一般的化学内容知识。此外，我们的分析指出，视觉模型理解是化学研究中先验知识与（获取的）内容知识之间关系的中介。鉴于视觉模型理解的这种明显重要性，我们的发现可以提供有关促进化学理解和学习方法的宝贵见解，尤其是对于在其职业生涯初期的学生而言。