The Influence Of Spatial Ability Over Studying Organic Molecular Structure

The spatial ability has shown distinctive effect in many aspects, especially in science education field. According to Barnea (2000) spatial ability involves representing, rotating and inverting objects in three dimensions when they are presented in two dimensions.About the spatial ability, lots of researchers have done studies in different fields for many years. Many foreign researchers have done studies about students' spatial ability in chemistry field. Researches indicate that the correlation between achievements in chemistry and spatial ability is very significant. In many previous studies, the effect of spatial ability in studying organic chemistry has been studied seldom. Most scholars just have proves that there are spatial ability exists in chemistry from psychological perspective, and its influence on chemistry study.So in this paper, we will examine four questions: (1) the overall level of students' spatial ability is how distributed; (2) the degree of students' understanding of molecule spatial structure in organic chemistry studying; (3 ) the students' ability of changing between molecular models as well as between the model and molecule structural formulas; (4) students' revolution ability to the molecular structure models and molecule cuneiform style.In this study, investigation, test, interview and statistics are major research methods. This thesis consists of three parts as follows:Firstly, by consulting and arranging large amount of studies, we know the present study progress and bring forward what be needed to study. Secondly, we work out relevance test by discussing with some middle school teachers. Finally, we carry out group test on the students.Through the research we find that: students' spatial ability also needs to be developed further in teaching activities; students' understanding of the space structure of matters includes language describe and figure representation; they will meet difficulties when changing between the models as well as between models and molecular structure formulas; cuneiform style and chemical reaction mechanism can play an important role when understanding molecule space structure; teachers can introduce and develop students' studying strategy about organic molecular space structure by using computer models and practical models and so on.