Modeling the Mole Understanding with Mathematical Reasoning
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Keywords:
The mole, Conversions, Proportional reasoning, Thermodynamics, mathematical modelling, instructional model, mole understandingAbstract
The amount of substance, expressed in the units of moles is an essential concept in chemistry and physics. Students entering physics courses usually possess a chemistry background. However, this study showed that their understanding of units of matter on the microscopic level is fragile, and needs improvement. Research shows that the complexity of interpretations of quantities expressed as ratios; molar mass or atomic mass makes formulating a dimensional analysis or proportion of these ratios unclear to students. Based on these findings, this study proposes applying equations of fundamental constants and proportional reasoning, instead of ratios, as the main building blocks to formulate conversion algorithms. In the line of that, a deductively designed lecture was delivered to a group (N=25) freshman college physics students. While on the pretest, only (N=4, 16%) correctly converted a mass of a substance expressed in kilograms to a number of moles, on the posttest the percentage of correct answers increased (N=20, 80%) suggesting that proportional reasoning coupled with fundamental constants brings clarity to the process and improves its understanding.
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