Impact of Student-Created Mechanism Videos in Organic Chemistry 2 Labs

We investigated the overall impact of assigning to students the creation of mechanism videos to be presented during the prelab lecture of second-semester organic chemistry labs. The main motivation of this study was the students' poor understanding of organic reaction mechanisms. Despite thorough coverage of mechanisms in the prelab lecture, we found from the previous final exams that very few students understood the organic chemistry reaction mechanisms covered in the laboratory experiments. Understanding a mechanism is an important and fundamental part of the organic chemistry curriculum, and we wanted to both improve understanding of reaction mechanisms and foster an appreciation for their importance. We developed a low-stakes assignment that allowed students to display their creativity and show their understanding of the concepts. Groups of three students were asked to prepare a voiced-over video presentation of a reaction mechanism. Our hypothesis was that students would understand the methods to write mechanisms better when they prepared the video themselves and visually demonstrated the mechanism. To gauge the impact of the exercise, a survey was administered at the end of the semester. The survey includes two open-ended questions and 10 Likert-scale questions. We asked the students to describe the overall experience of creating the videos as well as watching them before performing the actual experiment. Feedback from 165 students suggests that the assignment is useful, enjoyable, and important. This exercise helped them to better understand an essential part of organic chemistry: understanding the reaction mechanisms. They also recommended this practice for future classes. The exercise has promoted collaboration and utilization of the time outside the classroom in an educational and informative manner. The review of final exams shows that the percentage of students with correct answers to mechanism questions has increased from 57% to 85%. In summary, our approach has created a positive impact in the overall understanding of reaction mechanisms in second-semester organic chemistry labs. © 2019 American Chemical Society.