# Investigation into the Impact of Online Learning and the Pandemic on Student Use of Mechanistic Arrows

## TL;DR

This study examines how the pandemic and online learning affected students' performance on organic chemistry tasks, finding mixed results depending on task difficulty.

## Contribution

The study provides new insights into how pandemic-related instructional changes impacted student performance on familiar and unfamiliar chemistry tasks.

## Key findings

- Students in 2022 performed worse on familiar tasks compared to pre-COVID years but improved by 2023.
- Performance on unfamiliar tasks remained consistently low across all cohorts, with less than 50% success.
- Some students maintained the ability to handle complex tasks despite pandemic challenges.

## Abstract

The impact of the COVID pandemic on student learning
is still being
felt more than two years after most classes returned to face-to-face
instruction. In this study we investigate how the pandemic and the
subsequent return to in-person instruction in an organic chemistry
course impacted student performance on a pair of tasks for which we
have historical data from pre-COVID courses. These tasks require students
to draw mechanisms and predict products for two reactions: (1) a familiar
reaction that students have been explicitly taught and (2) a reaction
that requires students to use their knowledge to predict how an unfamiliar
starting material will behave Analysis of the student responses for
the familiar task showed that the 2022 (COVID cohort did not perform
as well as in earlier studies), but by spring 2023 post COVID students
had returned to a more normal pattern of performance that aligned
well with our historical pre-COVID data (2018). In contrast, for the
historically more difficult unfamiliar reaction, there was no significant
difference among the cohorts’ ability to draw a plausible mechanism
and predict a product over the three years of the study. That is there
appeared to be a cadre of students who were able to complete this
task despite the stress of a pandemic and changing instructional modalities.
However, the percentage of students who were able to complete this
unfamiliar task is typically less than 50% of the total. The implications
of these findings are discussed.