More than Marshmallows: Implementation and Assessment of an Interactive In-Class Activity for Learning VSEPR Theory
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The impact of an interactive in-class Valence-Shell Electron-Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) activity, designed and implemented by the author in her first-year undergraduate chemistry classes, was assessed through the statistical analysis of pre- and posttreatment quizzes on VSEPR theory and the analysis of questionnaires. The activity consisted of students engaging in hands-on learning by building various VSEPR shapes using marshmallows and toothpicks while also completing a VSEPR activity sheet, which required writing down the following information: geometry name, molecular shape name, VSEPR class, drawing a picture of the shape they built─including identifying bond angles, and explaining why they thought the molecular shape has the name it does. Statistical analysis of the pre- and posttreatment quizzes revealed a significant difference in student learning of VSEPR theory with those who were given the option of participating in the activity prior to writing the posttreatment quiz showing a higher level of learning. Analysis of questionnaire results complemented the statistical analysis results, with students largely giving positive feedback on the activity with respect to their learning and understanding of VSEPR theory and their ability to use components of the activity to self-assess. In addition, analysis of the questionnaire results also revealed that the activity aligns with tenets of constructivism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it