Students’ interpretation and use of graphical representations: insights afforded by modeling the varied population schema as a coordination class

Explanations of phenomena in chemistry are grounded in discussions of particulate-level behavior, but there are limitations to focusing on single particles, or as an extension, viewing a group of particles as displaying uniform behavior. More sophisticated models of physical processes evoke considerations related to the dynamic nature of bulk solutions, in which an ensemble of molecules exists with a distribution of values that vary with respect...