Vicente Talanquer

University of Arizona | UA · Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (College of Science)

A variety of research studies reveal the advantages of actively engaging students in the learning process through collaborative work in the classroom. However, the complex nature of the learning environment in large college general chemistry courses makes it challenging to identify the different factors that affect students’ cognitive and social en...

Instructors often encounter challenges in the implementation of evidence-based teaching practices in large-enrollment STEM courses. A novel Instructional-Teams Model (I-TM) seeks to address some of these challenges with the support of student assistants in specialized roles. I-TM roles focus on supporting course and classroom management (instructio...

The inclusion of experimentation in Chemistry classes represents a pedagogical tool to improve the understanding of concepts, enabling students to establish connections between content and scientific practices. Through experimentation, it is possible to enrich the learning experience by stimulating the development of students' chemical thinking and...

The effective implementation of evidence‐based teaching (EBT) in large college courses benefits from the successful use of instructional teams. An instructional team's feedback allows instructors to act based on evidence of student learning, addressing students' needs. This feedback may be particularly important for novice instructors or experience...

This chapter offers an overview of science education in Latin America, considering how public policies, curricula, instruction, assessment, and science teacher preparation have changed in the region in the last six decades. The author also identifies the most relevant trends in science education research in Latin America, highlighting dominant theo...

Teaching is a complex activity that demands paying attention to diverse components and relationships that affect the learning process, and acting with intentionality to build and nurture those connections. In this qualitative research study, we proposed and used an intentional–relational framework to explore differences in the relationships that fo...

En este trabajo se resumen los resultados de investigaciones en ciencias cognitivas, educación de las ciencias y didácticas disciplinarias específicas sobre el razonamiento humano que proporcionan información relevante para el aprendizaje de la química, y se resaltan sus implicaciones para el currículum, la enseñanza y la evaluación en la disciplin...

Education is always evolving, and most recently has shifted to increased online or remote learning. Digital Learning and Teaching in Chemistry compiles the established and emerging trends in this field, specifically within the context of learning and teaching in chemistry. This book shares insights about five major themes: best practices for teachi...

External visual representations of chemical entities and processes (chemical representations) play a critical role in chemical thinking and practice. They support reasoning by serving as bridges between the macroscopic world and the chemical models that help us make sense of the properties and behaviors of substances in our surroundings. Consequent...

In transforming undergraduate STEM education, it is important to understand the personal and contextual factors that impact instructors’ reform efforts. In this study we explored an instructor’s drivers and motivators for change in perspectives and practice, with an emphasis on the impact of an internal community (her ‘instructional team’) comprise...

A 3-year IUPAC project Systems Thinking in Chemistry for Sustainability: Toward 2030 and Beyond (STCS 2030+, IUPAC Project #2020-014-3-050) [1] launched in late 2020 is breaking important new ground in addressing chemistry’s orientations, roles, and responsibilities in the 21 st Century and helping to map out implications for chemistry education, r...

Online science teaching and learning have expanded extensively in the field of higher education over the past two decades. As institutions have been forced to quickly pivot to either synchronous remote or asynchronous online instructional modes due to the COVID-19 pandemic , understanding how to create online learning environments that effectively...

Research on student argumentation in chemistry laboratories has mainly focused on evaluating the quality of students’ arguments and analyzing the structure of such arguments ( i.e. claims, evidence, and rationale). Despite advances in these areas, little is known about the impact of activity framing on the nature of student argumentation in laborat...

Students’ abilities to self-assess their understanding can influence their learning and academic performance. Different factors, such as performance level, have been shown to relate to student self-assessment. In this study, hierarchical linear modeling was used to identify factors and quantify their effects on the changes observed in chemistry stu...

Evaluation of student written work during summative assessments is an important task for instructors at all educational levels. Nevertheless, few research studies exist that provide insights into how different instructors approach this task. In this study, we characterised variation in chemistry instructors’ approaches to the evaluation and grading...

Several studies have highlighted the positive effects that active learning may have on student engagement and performance. However, the influence of active learning strategies is mediated by several factors, including the nature of the learning environment and the cognitive level of in-class tasks. These factors can affect different dimensions of s...

Previous research on student argumentation in the chemistry laboratory has emphasized the evaluation of argument quality or the characterization of argument structure ( i.e. , claims, evidence, rationale). In spite of this progress, little is known about the impact of the wide array of factors that impact students’ argumentation in the undergraduat...

Formative assessment has been proven to be highly effective in improving student understanding. Nevertheless, many instructors struggle to engage in this practice, particularly when working in large-enrollment classrooms. To facilitate and foster the implementation of formative assessment in chemistry courses, undergraduate students at our institut...

The ability to build mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena is highly valued in all scientific disciplines, including chemistry. In this paper, we summarize the results of a qualitative study designed to characterize the nature of the mechanistic explanations built by college General Chemistry students when analyzing a physical process invol...

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we s...

The decisions and actions that chemistry educators make regarding why, what, how, and when to teach certain content or implement a specific instructional activity are often guided, but also constrained, by explicit or implicit “didaktik models”. These types of models direct our attention and actions when designing curricula, planning for instructio...

Understanding how chemistry teachers' interventions shape the reasoning that students express after a lesson is critical to support prospective and in-service teachers as they work with students´ ideas in the classroom. In this qualitative research study, we analysed changes in the reasoning expressed by 10th grade students in a Chilean school in t...

Formative assessment has been shown to be a critical activity for promoting meaningful understanding in the classroom. Systematic engagement in formative assessment helps instructors to develop a clearer picture of where students stand in relation to the learning objectives of the course. However, college instructors teaching large-enrollment STEM...

Formative assessment has been shown to be a critical activity for promoting meaningful understanding in the classroom. Systematic engagement in formative assessment helps instructors to develop a clearer picture of where students stand in relation to the learning objectives of the course. However, college instructors teaching large-enrollment STEM...

Current educational reform efforts emphasize the importance of developing students’ abilities to engage in a variety of science practices, including creating and using models, generating arguments, and building explanations. To achieve these goals, we need to change more than our instructional methods. It is also critical that we carefully reflect...

Understanding the nature of chemical thinking and action, as well as their application and impact on our world should be central goals of chemistry education at all educational levels. However, traditional school chemistry is still mostly focused on having students learn the body of declarative knowledge built over the years in the discipline. Achi...

The ability to build arguments and explanations based on scientific models is emphasized in current educational standards as a central science practice that students should develop in their science classes. In chemistry, it is expected that students will be able to apply their understanding in the construction of mechanistic explanations using subm...

p>La interacción de un sistema con su alrededor en condiciones tales que lo mantengan muy alejado de su estado de equilibrio puede dar lugar a estructuras dinámicas nuevas en las que la energía proporcionada se utiliza para organizar al sistema a...</p

p>Nuestro recorrido por el campo de la auto-organización nos ha mostrado que existe una gran variedad de sistemas que son capaces de generar estructuras espaciales...</p

p>Con este artículo de la serie "Para Saber, Experimentar y Simular" empezamos un juego de tres retos a la imaginación, centrado en un tema actual conocido como auto-organización.</p

p>Cómo, si pudiéramos, crearíamos un mundo simple y multiforme, aparentemente azaroso pero infinitamente estructurado. Cuántas leyes o principios como máximo nos concederíamos el privilegio de establecer. Quizás, en el intento de soñar, decidiéramos escribir unas pocas frases y multiplicarlas aleatoriamente en numerosos idiomas bien diferenciados....

div class="page" title="Page 1"> Escribir sobre la enseñanza de las ciencia a nivel secundaria en nuestro país, es como escribir sobre un mundo vacío en el que queda todo por hacer. Situada entre el nivel básico, que ha sido por muchos años campo de acción para psicólogos y pedagogos, y el nivel medio-superior, que por su cercanía ha motivado el i...

p>La experiencia cotidiana nos ha enseñado que la mayoría de los líquidos, a diferencia de los sólidos y los gases, mojan. Sin embargo, también hemos aprendido que la capacidad de un fluido para extenderse sobre una superficie depende de las características...</p

span>Los anillos del tiempo</span

span>Es sin duda para mí un placer tener la oportunidad de participar en la presentación del libro Lo mismo y no lo mismo de Roald Hoffmann, traducido ahora al español y publicado por el Fondo de Cultura Económica. Felicito, sin reservas, a todos los culpables de ofrecer y difundir esta obra en nuestra lengua.</span

span>Los espacios en los que simultáneamente se abre la oportunidad de educar en ciencias, investigar sobre el fenómeno educativo y divulgar la ciencia son generalmente reducidos. Los educadores, los investigadores y los divulgadores del conocimiento científico tienen objetivos distintos y su trabajo se dirige a audiencias con diferentes expectativ...

span>Hace miles de años, Homero, al escribir la Iliada y la Odisea, utilizó la palabra kystallos para referirse a las grandes formaciones de cristal de roca que sus héroes encontraron en el camino. En griego clásico esta palabra significa hielo claro, y de ella se deriva el término cristal con el que hoy día identificamos el estado de agregación de...

span>No se puede negar que la manera de pensar ----que no de actuar, desgraciadamente---- sobre la educación en ciencias ha sufrido un cambio radical en los últimos 25 años. Sin mucho temor a equivocarme diría que en este periodo hemos sido testigos de una auténtica revolución ----en el sentido más kuhniano del término----, del pensamiento educativ...

span>La adsorción es un fenómeno fisicoquímico de gran importancia, debido a sus aplicaciones múltiples en la industria química y en el laboratorio. En particular, resulta fundamental en procesos químicos que son acelerados por la presencia de catalizadores cuyo estado de agregación es distinto al de los reactivos. Este tipo de catálisis heterogéne...

One of the central goals of modern science and chemistry education is to develop students’ abilities to understand complex phenomena, and productively engage in explanation, justification, and argumentation. To accomplish this goal, we should better characterise the types of reasoning that we expect students to master in the different scientific di...

The central goal of this research study was to characterise the different types of reasoning manifested by high school chemistry students when building initial written explanations of a natural phenomenon. In particular, our study participants were asked to explain why a mixture of water and alcohol works as an antifreeze. Data collected in the for...

span>En los últimos años varios autores han sugerido que una gran proporción de las concepciones alternativas de los estudiantes de ciencias son el resultado de la aplicación de razonamiento guiado por la intuición o el sentido común (Driver, Guesne, y Tiberghien, 1985; Driver et al., 1994; Viennot, 2001; Talanquer, 2002, 2005, 2006). Este tipo de...

Given the nature of modern societies and the global challenges that we face, chemistry education has to be reconceptualized to open diverse opportunities for students to critically and reflexively question and engage with the world they live in. This reconceptualization demands developing and adopting curricula and instructional approaches that fos...

Science educators across the world recognize the importance of developing students’ ability to build arguments and explanations using scientific models. However, the type of mechanistic reasoning that we would like students to develop is challenging for many learners because it demands the simultaneous analysis of multiple factors operating at diff...

We present the results of a qualitative research study designed to explore differences in the types of reasoning triggered by information presented to chemistry students in two different formats. One group of students was asked to analyze a sequence of images designed to represent critical elements in the explanation of a target phenomenon. Another...

In this essay, findings from research in science and chemistry education are used to describe and discuss progression in students' structure-property reasoning through schooling. This work provides insights into the challenges that students face to master this important component of chemical thinking. The analysis reveals that student reasoning is...

Calls for educational reform in undergraduate STEM education have become more prominent in recent years, particularly in introductory/foundational courses. Such reform efforts were initiated 10 years ago in the general chemistry program at the University of Arizona. In this contribution, we describe the major successes and challenges encountered du...

Several concept inventories have been developed to elicit students’ alternative conceptions in chemistry. It is suggested that heuristic reasoning may bias students’ answers in these types of assessments toward intuitively appealing choices. If this is the case, one could expect students to improve their performance by engaging in more analytical r...

El éxito de reformas educativas basadas en resultados de la investigación en educación de las ciencias depende de la capacidad de los docentes para implementar formas de enseñanza ambiciosas y responsivas tanto a las expectativas de desempeño establecidas en estándares educativos nacionales como a las experiencias, ideas e intereses de los estudian...

The central goal of this study was to analyze the complexity of students' explanations about how and why chemical reactions happen in terms of the types of causal connections students built between expressed concepts and ideas. We were particularly interested in characterizing differences in the types of reasoning applied by students with different...

Research in science education has revealed that many students struggle to understand chemical reactions. Improving teaching and learning about chemical processes demands that we develop a clearer understanding of student reasoning in this area and of how this reasoning evolves with training in the domain. Thus, we have carried out a qualitative stu...

Central ideas define fundamental understandings in a domain and frame curriculum development, instruction, and assessment. How these central ideas are conceptualized can thus have a major impact on what teachers and instructors do in the classroom and on the understandings that students develop. This commentary presents a reflection on how central...

The central goal of this study was to characterize major patterns of reasoning exhibited by college chemistry students when analyzing and interpreting chemical data. Using a case study approach, we investigated how a representative student used chemical models to explain patterns in the data based on structure-property relationships. Our results el...

Making decisions about the production and use of chemical substances is of central importance in many fields. In this study, a research team comprising teachers and educational researchers collaborated in collecting and analyzing cognitive interviews with students from 8th grade through first-year university general chemistry in an effort to map pr...

Los resultados de la investigacion educativa en los ultimos40 a˜nos han revelado que los metodos de ense˜nanza tra-dicionales basados en la exposicion de conocimientos sonpoco efectivos en el desarrollo de aprendizajes significati-vos. La evidencia acumulada en el area de ense˜nanza delas ciencias sugiere que la comprension de ideas centralesen una...

The central goal of this qualitative research study was to uncover major implicit assumptions that students with different levels of training in the discipline apply when thinking and making decisions about chemical reactions used to make a desired product. In particular, we elicited different ways of conceptualizing why chemical reactions happen (...

The ability to evaluate options and make informed decisions about problems in relevant contexts is a core competency in science education that requires the use of both domain-general and discipline-specific knowledge and reasoning strategies. In this study we investigated the implicit assumptions and modes of reasoning applied by individuals with d...

The goal of this exploratory study was to analyze how beginning prospective secondary school teachers approached the analysis of student written responses to formative assessment probes. We sought to identify what elements of students' written work were noticed, what types of inferences of student understanding were built, and what these noticed el...

Threshold concepts are conceived as cognitive portals to new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking in a domain. They are transformative, integrative, irreversible, and troublesome Concepts that open the door to highly productive ways of thinking in a discipline. Mastering threshold concepts in chemistry demands the construction of diverse co...

Many students are not very interested in the content of school chemistry lessons. They wonder why they need to know the chemistry concepts. In this contribution, their question is reformulated in broader terms as illustrated by this chapter’s title and different answers are explored from the perspective of two important groups of stakeholders in ch...

Given the diversity of materials in our surroundings, one should expect scientifically literate citizens to have a basic understanding of the core ideas and practices used to analyze chemical substances. In this article, we use the term ‘chemical identity' to encapsulate the assumptions, knowledge, and practices upon which chemical analysis relies....

Professional development that bridges gaps between educational research and practice is needed. However, bridging gaps can be difficult because teachers and educational researchers often belong to different Communities of Practice, as their activities, goals, and means of achieving those goals often differ. Meaningful collaboration among teachers a...

Students in our chemistry classes often generate shallow responses to our questions and problems. They fail to recognize relevant cues in making judgments and decisions about the properties of chemical substances and processes, and make hasty generalizations that frequently lead them astray. Results from research in the psychology of decision makin...

The extent and quality of Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) at the post-secondary level have grown substantially in recent years. Associated research findings are central to current reform efforts to transform science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in colleges and universities across the United States. The increased vi...

Technological advances in the last twenty years have led to the development of powerful software for qualitative data analysis. Computer assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) packages facilitate managing multiple tasks in qualitative research, from organizing data sources based on relevant characteristics, segmenting and categorizing data acc...

Chemistry teaching has traditionally been weakly connected to everyday life, technology, society, and history and philosophy of science. This article highlights knowledge areas and perspectives needed by the humanistic (and critical-reflexive) chemistry teacher. Different humanistic approaches in chemistry teaching – from simple contextualization t...

The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has had a major influence on research on science teacher knowledge and thinking in the past 25 years. However, PCK has shown to be a difficult concept to characterize and thus it has been the subject of diverse interpretations. In this paper I present a personal reflection about both the nature of...

Dominant educational approaches in chemistry focus on the learning of somewhat isolated concepts and ideas about chemical substances and reactions. Reform efforts often seek to engage students in the generation of knowledge through the investigation of chemical phenomena, with emphasis on the development and application of models to build causal ex...

The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has had a major influence on research on science teacher knowledge and thinking in the past 25 years. However, PCK has shown to be a difficult concept to characterize and thus it has been the subject of diverse interpretations. In this paper I present a personal reflection about both the nature of...

Research in science education is concerned with studying and describing how student learning develops over time toward building understanding of core 'big ideas.' This paper offers perspectives on how the development of coherent conceptual understanding in chemistry may be approached. Following an overview of what 'learning progressions' are, the f...

Chemistry students and teachers often explain the chemical reactivity of atoms, molecules, and chemical substances in terms of purposes or needs (e.g., atoms want or need to gain, lose, or share electrons in order to become more stable). These teleological explanations seem to have pedagogical value as they help students understand and use abstract...

Science education frameworks and standards play a central role in the development of curricula and assessments, as well as in guiding teaching practices in grades K–12. Recently, the National Research Council published a new Framework for K–12 Science Education that has guided the development of the Next Generation Science Standards. In this paper,...

Teaching reform efforts in chemistry education often involve engaging students in small-group activities of different types. This study focused on the analysis of how activity type affected the nature of group conversations. In particular, we analyzed the small-group conversations of students enrolled in a chemistry course for nonscience majors. Gr...

Diverse implicit cognitive elements seem to support but also constrain reasoning in different domains. Many of these cognitive constraints can be thought of as either implicit assumptions about the nature of things or reasoning heuristics for decision-making. In this study we applied this framework to investigate college students' understanding of...

The chemistry knowledge that we want our students to develop is rich, complex, and multifaceted. However, some teachers and instructors at the secondary school and college levels approach it in rather rigid and unidimensional ways. The central goal of this contribution is to describe and discuss 10 different complementary perspectives or “facets” f...

The central goal of this work is to illustrate how the analysis of chemistry student thinking based on the identification of implicit assumptions about the nature of chemical substances and processes, together with the elicitation of shortcut reasoning strategies used to make judgments and decisions, can help us better explain the difficulties that...

The theoretical construct of teacher noticing has allowed mathematics teacher educators to examine teacher thinking and practice by looking at the range of activities that teachers notice in the classroom. Guided by this approach to the study of teacher thinking, the central goal of this exploratory study was to identify what prospective science te...

The central goal of this exploratory study was to characterize the effects of experiments involving different levels of inquiry on the nature of college students’ written reflections about laboratory work. Data were collected in the form of individual lab reports written using a science writing heuristic template by a subset of the students enrolle...