Active Learning with Visual Representations in College Science

Visual representations play an important role in chemistry. They provide opportunities to engage students actively in individual and collaborative sense-making of complex concepts. In this chapter, we review research on learning with visual representations in individual and collaborative activities. We then describe how we implemented the lessons learned from this research to design activities that combine individual and collaborative sense-making activities with visual representations. We provide concrete examples of these activities for an advanced general chemistry course. To evaluate the effectiveness of these activities, we conducted a quasi-experiment as part of this course. Our results suggest that individual sense-making in self-study activities prior to collaborative sense-making activities in class yield higher learning outcomes than traditional lecture-centric instruction.