Why the Ross Periodic Table "Works"

It only makes sense to say that a table "works" if it can actually do work. The first thing to note about the Ross periodic table is that, compared to the Bohr model, the complexity has been reduced to just three salient items.

• Core charge - the "net" charge of the [ nucleus + inner electrons ]. You can see more here
• Valence configuration - basically the same as the Bohr and Lewis diagrams
• Radius - the distance at which the valence electrons "orbit" the core

This has weighty pedagogical implications. If you make the assumption that Jim Ross is an adult (as opposed to a stale teenager, well past the best-before date), you might attribute to my brain the capacity to work with five-to-seven different things at once. Your teenage students are capable of working with only three-to-five things at once.

The Ross model of the atom has only three salient features, so the adolescent learner must keep only three salient features in mind at one time. This is well within the capacity of the average teenage mind.

Not only that, but these three salient features actually "work" in cognitive patterns that correspond to students' everyday experience. That is... if your average adolescent student perceives these three salient features of a Ross atom in a "normal," "everyday experience" kind of way, that adolescent can make surprisingly accurate predictions of the chemical behaviour of the element. In that sense, the Ross table "works" in ways that other periodic tables do not.

I guess that I'll have to write another blog on the cognitive structures that I see teenagers using to explain novel experiences for which they have no other functioning models.