Identifying research foci to progress chemistry education as a field

Abstract

Chemistry education is now increasingly seen as an academic field of scholarship in its own right. This article suggests two important principles to be taken into account when considering the question ‘What should be the key foci for chemistry education research (CER)?’. The first of these applies a typology that divides research into chemistry classrooms as inherent (‘essential’), embedded (‘entangled’) or collateral (‘incidental’), according to the extent to which the research is conceptualised in terms of issues that arise in teaching and learning the specific subject matter of chemistry. It is important for the development of the field that inherent CER is particularly encouraged. The second principle relates to what makes a field scientific. Here it is suggested that research needs to have a programmatic nature so that the field does not just accumulate more studies, but is seen to progress by allowing new researchers to effectively be inducted and then build upon existing work.