Investigating Chemistry Students’ Skills to Mentally Manipulate (Rotation & Reflection) 2D Symbolic Molecular Representations

The use of two-dimensional (2D) symbolic representations for describing, communicating and reasoning about phenomena and concepts is a common practice in Chemistry. Many researchers have shown that there is a positive correlation between visuospatial ability and fluency with chemical representations. The aim of this study is the exploration of chemistry students’ skills to visualize and mentally manipulate molecular structures. In this paper the results of the implementation to chemistry students of the computerized version of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotation and two purposely designed and developed prototype «visualization» instruments dealing with rotation and reflection of 2D symbolic molecular representations are presented.