Using data-driven activities with ChemEd X Data to practice structure-property relationships in General Chemistry

General Chemistry covers a wide variety of structure-property relationships that rely upon electronic, atomic, crystal or molecular factors. Giving students experimental data will allow them to identify the structure-property patterns as well as identify the limit of predictability of such patterns. “ChemEd X Data” is a web interface designed by the author that facilitates the navigation, filtering and graphical representation of chemical and physical data. It can assist students at identifying trends in structure-property relationships, they can create controlled experiments to test a relationship as well as investigating how different molecular factors may affect a single macroscopic property. In particular, since the site offers unstructured but dynamically searchable data, it is designed to have students learn control of variable strategies (CVS). This paper describes the implementation of a five-step sequence of activities related to structure-property relationships in a General Chemistry semester. ChemEd X Data is used for the open-ended or data-driven steps of this sequence. Student performance is analyzed with the objective of understanding which activities require a higher cognitive skill, as well as identify student previous performances that correlate with success in the activities and in the course in general.