There have been numerous educational initiatives that have driven the push for helping students develop deep conceptual understanding. One of the difficulties for educators is assessing whether students have actually made gains in understanding. Ask any teacher to define “conceptual understanding” and their definition may be very different from the next teacher’s definition. The authors of this timely article have taken the definitions of well over a thousand instructors and identified a consensus articulation of what conceptual understanding is. This article will be of interest to any teacher struggling to assess their student’s conceptual understanding of content.
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Defining Conceptual Understanding in General Chemistry
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00218