Students were recruited in Organic Chemistry 2 at random 33 without collecting demographic or academic information and were given a $40 gift card for their participation. Data was collected using think-aloud interviews. Students were given one problem at a time via Qualtrics and instructed to provide a complete verbal description of their problem-solving process. With the video feature disabled, the audio was recorded and transcribed using Zoom. The researchers reviewed the recordings and 125 edited the transcriptions to account for errors in the automatic transcription. The E1cB prompt is provided in Figure . The prompt includes additional information regarding the rate-determining step to foster discussion and arguments surrounding the reaction mechanism that will be included in the discussion. The same mechanism as shown in Figure was provided and students were asked the following questions: Which step of this reaction is the least thermodynamically favorable? Why is the step you selected the least thermodynamically favorable?