Ozcan GulacarUniversity of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Chemistry
Ozcan Gulacar
Doctor of Philosophy
About
44
Publications
11,257
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379
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am currently working as an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of California-Davis. My main responsibilities are teaching General Chemistry courses and conducting educational research with undergraduate researchers. Our projects revolve around exploring interactions between different elements of cognitive and affective domains in the context of socio-scientific issues, sustainability, problem solving, and knowledge structures.
Publications
Publications (44)
With the amount of data available through an online homework system about
students’ study habits, it stands to reason that such systems can be used to
identify likely student outcomes. A study was conducted to see how student
usage of an online chemistry homework system, Online Web-based Learning
(OWL) correlated with student success in a general c...
Teaching undergraduate general chemistry in the USA generally follows a structure-of-the-discipline approach which is challenged by a wider understanding of learning for sustainability, transformative education, and the call for a stronger integration of the societal dimension of relevant science education. This chapter highlights the importance of...
Chemistry is traditionally perceived as difficult to comprehend. Its mastery requires that a variety of concepts be linked to form an organized knowledge system. The connections need to be made not only between the concepts associated with the macroscopic level of the chemistry triplet but also between the submicroscopic and symbolic levels. Many f...
Part of what makes research in problem solving difficult is the multitude of ways in which students can be unsuccessful in solving problems. Research that combines qualitative and quantitative methods provides an in-depth understanding of students’ problem-solving strategies. Each step of a multi-step problem can be labelled as a subproblem and rep...
This study evaluates the effects of integrating the socio-scientific issue of phosphate sustainability into a large enrollment general chemistry course. The integration was based on the use of a digital learning environment designed by the software Prezi. The learning environment introduced the structure and the properties of phosphate, its economi...
Although there are numerous studies that aim to reveal the source of student failure in problem solving in STEM fields, there is a lack of attention on testing different methods to identify what works best in improving students’ problem-solving performance. In this study, the authors examined the influence of the type of problem construction interv...
In this study, 271 pre- and in-service science teachers in Israel were surveyed on their level of awareness about green chemistry and sustainability, as well as attitudes toward environmental education. Of the total participants, 123 were in-service science teachers with different seniority levels teaching in elementary, middle, and high schools. T...
This study aimed to examine the impact of years of experience and field of expertise on the development of chemistry knowledge structures from STEM experts comprising 103 professors, 10 postdocs, and 146 doctoral students. Of these participants, 127 were specialized in chemistry, and the rest were from various science and engineering disciplines. A...
Current studies on group work illustrate the importance of student collaboration for enhancing conceptual understanding and participation in science. Research also documents the roles students adopt within group work, with some studies illustrating the underlying power relations. This study sought to expand on prior research literature to understan...
Making science relevant to students' lives, future careers, or societies by introducing controversial socio-scientific issues in classrooms motivates students to take more active roles in learning science. This study explored the influence of integrating two sustainability-oriented socio-scientific issues (SOS2Is) - alternative energies and nanotec...
One of the major challenges of teaching science has been engaging students in discussions of concepts due to the lack of perceived relevancy of topics to students’ individual goals and societal issues. Science has been viewed as a set of abstract topics disconnected from the real world. To increase student motivation, self-efficacy, and interest in...
The questions in the practice assignments given to students in the form of worksheets or other formats are often grouped by chapter, topic, or concepts. There is a great emphasis on categorization. Most of the end-of-chapter problems in chemistry textbooks are organized by sections. Although this was done with the intention of helping students navi...
Concept maps are powerful tools used to reveal challenges in students’ learning. However, their use introduces complexities when a large group of students’ conceptualizations need to be examined. In this study, concept maps of 344 general chemistry students were analyzed after grouping them based on achievement in chemistry, math proficiency, and g...
A new teaching assistant model was adopted and qualitatively assessed for the general chemistry laboratory, in which both an undergraduate and a graduate teaching assistant provided instruction to students during the lab. Verbal interactions between graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants were recorded, transcribed, and coded using the modif...
This study focused on inquiring into undergraduate chemistry professors’ efforts in North America to increase student motivation and interest in the subject and the feasibility of methods that connect students to real world applications and societal issues related to chemistry. A survey was distributed to chemistry instructors at post-secondary ins...
The development of problem-solving skills – particularly with stoichiometry concepts – is paramount for succeeding in a general chemistry sequence. Key concepts related to problem solving and stoichiometry were analyzed and reported in this paper. The study analyzed retention of stoichiometry concepts over two consecutive quarters, the correlations...
The paper describes a curriculum innovation project for integrating the sustainability-oriented socio-scientific issue of phosphate recovery into undergraduate chemistry education. Justification for the topic is derived from the importance of responsible use of phosphates as fertilizers for achieving some of the sustainable development goals issued...
To gauge the variability in expert problem-solving strategies for stoichiometry problems, a set of experts in different career tracks were studied with the cohort including 17 graduate students in chemistry, three college chemistry instructors, and seven college graduates working in the industry. The goal of the study was to determine whether varia...
Phosphates are essential components of any efficient fertilizer. Natural phosphate rock is, however, not available in every part of the world. According to the European Commission, phosphate rock has high economic importance as well as a certain supply risk - at least for Europe. For these reasons, environmental technology research has received a g...
Phosphate sind ein kaum beachtetes Thema im Chemieunterricht, obwohl Phosphate essentiell für unser Leben sind. Die Europäische Kommission stuft Phosphatgestein als kritischen Rohstoff ein, was seine wirtschaftliche Bedeutung, aber auch ein potentielles Versorgungsrisiko anzeigt. Unter dieser Prämisse entstand ein Schülerlaborangebot zur Rückgewinn...
Success in chemistry requires not only the ability to recruit prior knowledge but also the ability to establish strong connections between new and existing concepts to form knowledge clusters around core principles. How these knowledge structures are organized can be used to understand the relationships between concepts within a student's mind. 618...
Many general chemistry courses in U.S. undergraduate education focus on decontextualized content learning, driven by a structure-of-the-discipline approach. Due to this approach, many students perceive general chemistry to be of low relevance to their educations, their lives, and society as a whole. This paper reflects a process of innovation for t...
Many general chemistry courses in U.S. undergraduate education focus on decontextualized content learning, driven by a structure-of-the-discipline approach. Due to this approach, many students perceive general chemistry to be of low relevance to their educations, their lives, and society as a whole. This paper reflects a process of innovation for t...
This study examines students’ conceptualization of scientific method from three perspectives: (a) participation in an international science fair, (b) gender differences, and (c) participation from different geographic regions worldwide. An online Word Association Test (WAT) with 10 stimulus words that are associated with scientific method was admin...
This paper presents a case study that investigated students’ perceptions on the integration of a socio-scientific issue into a general chemistry course at a public university located in northwestern California. The teaching intervention is based on a digital learning environment structured by the software Prezi that students used to explore the iss...
Acid−base chemistry tends to be one of the more challenging concepts for students to master in high school and undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Mastery of acid−base chemistry requires a concrete understanding of acid−base theories, chemical equilibrium, electronegativity, periodic trends, and the ability to conceptualize intricate processes at a...
One of the topics that chemistry teachers have a great challenge introducing is chemical equilibrium. When being introduced to chemical equilibrium, many students have difficulties in understanding that some reactions do not go to completion, as this contrasts most of their supposed prior experiences in chemistry lessons. Students may also struggle...
Science education reform emphasizes innovative and constructivist views of science teaching and learning that promotes active learning environments, dynamic instructions, and authentic science experiments. Technology-based and hands-on instructional designs are among innovative science teaching and learning methods. Research shows that these two ty...
Social cognitive theory guided the design of a survey to investigate high school students’ perceptions of factors affecting their career contemplations and beliefs regarding the influence of their participation in the international Science Olympiad on their subject interests and twenty-first century skills. In addition, gender differences in studen...
A study is presented that explores how students’ knowledge structures, as related to the scientific method, compare at different student ages. A word association test comprised of ten total stimulus words, among them experiment, science fair, and hypothesis, is used to probe the students’ knowledge structures. Students from grades four, five, and e...
This paper reports a comparison of a group of higher- and lower-achieving undergraduate chemistry students, 17 in total, as separated on their ability in stoichiometry. This exploratory study of 17 students investigated parallels and differences in the students’ general and domain-specific cognitive abilities. Performance, strategies, and mistakes...
If the goal of teaching is to help students understand a subject, teaching cannot begin until student difficulties with a subject are understood. In order to create a guide for assessing student difficulties with chemistry material, students were asked to rate exam questions on three factors: problem difficulty, familiarity, and self-confidence. Th...
Social cognitive theory guided the design of a survey to investigate high school students’ perceptions of factors affecting their career contemplations and beliefs regarding the influence of their participation in the international Science Olympiad on their subject interests and twenty-first century skills. In addition, gender differences in studen...
High school students in ninth and tenth-grade biology and chemistry classes were part of a
study to determine how incorporating tablet PC’s with web-based technology and POGIL
(Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) roles in science classes influences students’
preferences for various learning methods. This paper explores these students’ stated...
A coding scheme is presented and used to evaluate solutions of seventeen students working on twenty five stoichiometry problems in a think-aloud protocol. The stoichiometry problems are evaluated as a series of sub-problems (e.g., empirical formulas, mass percent, or balancing chemical equations), and the coding scheme was used to categorize each s...
The problem-solving strategies of students enrolled in general chemistry courses have been the subject of numerous research investigations. In most cases, the investigators were interested in the specific areas or concepts that posed the greatest difficulty to a student's success in achieving the correct answer. However, the investigation repo...
While online and face-to-face (F2F) courses have been compared in numerous studies, there has been a lack of focus on online chemistry courses. This study was conducted to compare the success of students instructed in an online or F2F general chemistry course for non-majors. One hundred forty six exam questions were categorized according to Bloom’s...
Several cognitive abilities were investigated in order to determine whether they correlated with undergraduates’ ability to solve stoichiometry problems. The problems were analyzed and broken down into constituent sub-problems in stoichiometry. Students were given a series of tests to measure their cognitive abilities in working memory capacity, fo...
Problem selection is critical in both project-based and problem-based learning. Krajcik, Czerniak, and Berger (2002) identify five criteria for good driving questions: sustainability, worth, feasibility, meaning, and contextualization. Although questioning is a central strategy in the sciences, many science students lack the ability to formulate go...
We present a quantitative model for predicting the level of difficulty subjects will experience with specific problems. The model explicitly accounts for the number of subproblems a problem can be broken into and the difficultly of each subproblem. Although the model builds on previously published models, it is uniquely suited for blending with qua...
While it is relatively easy to find problems that are difficult for learners to solve, it is much trickier to pin down what it is about difficult problems that makes them difficult. In this paper we will examine some of the available models for predicting problem difficulty. We will then build on these models to present a new model, which we combin...
In this study, I investigated how successful and unsuccessful students solve stoichiometry problems. I focus on three research questions: (1) To what extent do the difficulties in solving stoichiometry problems stem from poor understanding of pieces (domain-specific knowledge) versus students' inability to link those pieces together (conceptual kno...
Projects
Projects (2)
This project aims to develop Prezi learning modules on seven Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and highlight their connections to science, society, economy, and the environment. The targeted goals include Zero Hunger (#2), Good Health and Well-being (#3), Clear Water and Sanitation (#6), Affordable and Clean Energy (#7), Climate Action (#13), Life Below Water (#14), and Life on Land (#15). Through these learning modules, our group aims to show how science topics usually taught in an isolated way are relevant to students’ lives, societies, and future careers.
