Undergraduate Chemistry Students’ Perceived Abilities and Declarative Knowledge on Some Basic Aspects and Concepts of Spectroscopy (Journal Article)

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Abstract: Spectroscopic methods of molecular structure identification and analysis constitute part of inorganic, organic, analytical, and physical chemistry in both undergraduate and postgraduate chemistry curricula. Despite the importance and complexity of the relevant concepts, it is only recently that studies on spectroscopy have started to appear in the education literature. These studies have focused on student interpretation of spectra. The purpose of this study was to deal with further fundamental issues underlying spectroscopy. We first present students’ perceptions of their knowledge about various aspects of spectroscopy such as the extent of their understanding of the basic concepts of UV, IR, NMR, and MS. In addition, we probed students’ declarative knowledge about basic concepts and features of spectroscopy. The results showed that mass spectrometry was perceived to be the least understood method, while IR was perceived to be the best understood. Students considered their ability to identify the spectroscopic method used for obtaining a spectrum to be relatively satisfactory, as also was, but to a lesser extent, their ability to extract information from the spectrum. Students rated their understanding of the differences among the four spectroscopic methods as moderate. Concerning students’ declarative knowledge about basic concepts and features of spectroscopy, such as the physical meaning of “wavenumber” in IR spectroscopy and of “part per million” in NMR spectroscopy, “performing integration”, and the “resolving power” of a spectrometer, the results were mostly poor. Interestingly, a clear difference was observed between performance on questions at high versus basic levels of declarative knowledge.