Mentor: Ellen Yezierski, Ph.D.

YouTube has become an increasingly common learning resource for students studying chemistry. Research shows that approximately 75% of students use YouTube to learn chemistry (Cherif, Siuda, Movahedzadeh, Martyn, Cannon, & Ayesh, 2014). Because so many students rely on these videos for educational purposes, it is important to evaluate how effectively they support learning. Recently, the group used Richard Mayer's Multimedia Principles to generate guidance on features that help students learn (with YouTube). Multimedia objects, like YouTube videos, focused on chemistry content also relies heavily on theory surrounding the visual representations of phenomena (Barman et al., 2026; Magnone et al., 2023). Johnstone's Triangle helps us organize the representations and their connections to one another. (Johnstone, 2010). In chemistry, oxidation and reduction is a particularly difficult topic for students to conceptually understand, one for which they may turn to YouTube for help. This research aims to evaluate popular oxidation-reduction YouTube videos using representational domains in chemistry, and potential for building conceptual understanding. This analysis requires competencies in chemistry representations (Johnstone's Domains) as well as robust chemistry content knowledge in redox chemistry. This poster explores how such content knowledge and competencies can be realized by an emerging researcher.

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