Ideas underpinning success in an introductory course in organic chemistry

Students coming to university chemistry courses have often been taught a considerable amount of organic chemistry at school level and may bring to their university course important ideas. These ideas are discussed in the context of the Scottish Higher Grade Chemistry course. The extent to which these ideas have been understood was measured with 367 first year chemistry students before the students started their first organic chemistry course at university, using structural communication grid questions. Their understanding was related to their performance in the class examination at the end of the course. It was found that bond polarity was the area of greatest difficulty, with problems also arising from the student understandings of functionality and stereochemistry. What this study has shown is that certain ideas in school chemistry are well established, and others are not so well established, and that performance in a first level chemistry course in specific areas of organic chemistry reflects the grasp of the underlying ideas gained from school. This emphasises the importance of knowing what ideas pupils bring with them from school courses and how they came to gain these ideas. It also pinpoints some topics that may need to be developed further before introducing new organic chemistry ideas