Using Students' Concept-building Tendencies to Better Characterize Average-Performing Student Learning and Problem-Solving Approaches in General Chemistry.

We previously reported that students' concept-building approaches, identified a priori using a cognitive psychology laboratory task, extend to learning complex science, technology, engineering, and mathematics topics. This prior study examined student performance in both general and organic chemistry at a select research institution, after accounting for preparation. We found that abstraction learners (defined cognitively as learning the theory underlying related examples) performed higher on course exams than exemplar learners (defined cognitively as learning by memorizing examples).