Friday, January 29, 2021 - 2:30pm

NMR spectroscopy is an essential tool used to elucidate molecular structure and to study chemical phenomena. We monitored undergraduate and graduate students as they evaluated the success of chemical syntheses through IR and 1H NMR spectral interpretation, a common task of practicing organic chemists. Participants completed a series of interpretation tasks while having their eye movements tracked and then participated in semi-structured, cued retrospective think-aloud interviews about their reasoning during spectral interpretation. These interviews were analyzed qualitatively to characterize chemical assumptions and heuristic reasoning strategies used by participants. Undergraduate participants exhibited uninformed bidirectional processing of all information, whereas doctoral participants exhibited informed unidirectional processing of relevant information. These findings imply that the community can support novices’ development of expertise by encouraging the use of informed interpretation strategies, including the preliminary evaluation of relevant variables, prediction of expected spectral features, and search for complementary data across spectra.

To view the recording of this seminar click here.

Speaker: 

Ginger Shultz, Assistant Professor

Institution: 

University of Michigan, Department of Chemistry

Location: 

Virtual Seminar