Popova, Bhaskar, and von Dohlen won the 2025 Internal Research Award!

PI Maia Popova, her graduate student, Roshni G. Bhaskar, and co-PI David von Dohlen won internal funding to develop an intervention to support organic chemistry student representational competence and reasoning with multiple representations. While much research has been done on representational competence, there remains a pressing need for practical tools that help students develop these crucial skills in authentic classroom environments. The intervention will be developed through backward design and piloted in a single section of Organic Chemistry I in Spring 2025. The results from this pilot will shape its broader rollout across experimental and control sections in Fall 2025. We will collect and analyze data from student interviews, surveys, and course artifacts to evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness. The broader impact of this project lies in its potential to provide chemistry educators with practical tools to support student mastery of a wide range of chemical representations, and findings will be disseminated broadly.