Does manipulating molecular models promote representation translation of diagrams in chemistry

摘要: Chemists use many different types of diagrams to represent molecules and must develop skills accurately translate between such diagrams. Translating can potentially involve the intermediate step forming an internal 3-d representation molecule, so we hypothesized that performance would be enhanced when concrete models were used. Thirty students provided with as they translated one molecular diagram into a second their spontaneous was recorded. Students' model coded for behaviors, moving, holding, reconfiguring, pointing to, or gesturing about model. Results showed great diversity in whether how used models. Although on representational translation task generally poor, using positively correlated performance.