Chemistry Education Research and Practice最新文献

Two-tiered assessment structures with paired content and confidence items are frequently used within chemistry assessments to stimulate and measure students’ metacognition. The confidence judgment is designed to promote students’ reflection on their application of content knowledge and can be characterized as calibrated or miscalibrated based on their accuracy. Previous studies often attributed students’ miscalibrated confidence rankings to metaignorance, however, in this qualitative study, interviews with general chemistry students were thematically analysed to provide a more robust understanding of the processes and factors students use when engaging with these metacognitive prompts in a chemistry assessment. Both calibrated and miscalibrated confidence judgments were observed independent of accuracy. Students who provided miscalibrated confidence judgments often used unreliable metrics such as processing fluency which can mimic content mastery whereas students who provided more accurate evaluations of their confidence relied more heavily on their stable understanding of chemistry concepts. Many students cited previous experiences, underlying self-efficacy beliefs, and/or the use of test-taking strategies which negatively or positively impacted their confidence. These findings suggest that the confidence tier is indeed capturing students’ self-assessment, however, students’ confidence judgments are based on a range of factors independent of content knowledge which may impede on the utility of this metacognitive tool for students, researchers, and instructors.

The paper presents the design and evaluation of a voluntary online introductory stoichiometry (VOIS) course aimed at facilitating the transition from secondary to higher education. The course utilized simple analogies and adaptive feedback through a formative scaffolding assessment. The study assessed the effectiveness of the VOIS course through pre- and post-knowledge tests, analysis of students' performance in general chemistry, and course evaluation surveys conducted at a Latin American University between 2019 and 2021. A total of 3995 first-year STEM students enrolled in the course voluntarily, and 358 students successfully completed it. The results showed a statistically significant improvement in stoichiometry-related knowledge, with the pre–post test scores increasing from 4.61 to 6.55 out of 10. The matched sample analysis, which only included students with 100% participation, demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in stoichiometry and related knowledge from 5.31 to 6.61. Furthermore, an analysis comparing the performance of students who completed the VOIS course with those who didn't reveal that the former group outperformed the latter by an average of 10.6 points in the general chemistry course. This statistically significant difference exhibited a large effect size (d = 0.8). In addition, a matching technique was employed to construct a synthetic control group in order to reduce bias in the quasi-experimental design. A successful propensity score analysis was conducted, controlling for variables such as gender, grade in high school, scores in the national test, and student ranking in their high school. The results of this analysis showed a statistically significant improvement of 8.6 points in the general chemistry performance for students who completed the VOIS course compared to those who did not enroll in the course. Furthermore, the feedback from 129 respondents indicated that 80% of the students either liked the VOIS course or liked it very much, with an overall satisfaction rating of 3.1 on a four-point scale. In conclusion, the VOIS course demonstrated positive outcomes in terms of enhanced stoichiometry knowledge, academic performance, and student satisfaction. These findings highlight the potential of online courses like VOIS in facilitating the transition to higher education.

In this study, we analyzed how general chemistry students generated experimental designs corresponding to general chemistry questions such as the ones typically found in general chemistry textbooks. We found that students were very successful in including experimental design aspects that were explicitly mentioned in the general chemistry questions, but less successful in including other experimental design aspects. We also analyzed the outcomes of students engaging in the counterpart process – expressing general chemistry laboratory experiments as typical general chemistry questions. We found that that students were very successful in considering the various components associated with expressing the experiments when considering each of the various components one at a time, but less successful when considering the various components at the same time. Considerations and suggestions for implementing these types of activities to enable a wide variety of general chemistry students to take part in experimental design are discussed. Implications for research and teaching, including a consideration of ChatGPT, are also presented.

Climate change presents a global human challenge, and many countries are paying increased attention to climate change issues. Chemistry plays a critical role in addressing climate change. The dual nature of pre-service chemistry teachers’ identity determines the importance of their understanding of climate change. This study employed a phenomenography methodological framework and semi-structured interviews to explore 16 pre-service chemistry teachers’ understanding of climate change's manifestations, causes, impacts, and ways to cope with climate change. The results showed that although pre-service chemistry teachers had a certain knowledge of climate change, their understanding of the concepts of climate change, global climate warming, and greenhouse effects and their interrelatedness was ambiguous or false. Their explanations of the harm caused by acid rain, the mechanism of ozone layer destruction, and the greenhouse effect were inadequate. Factors that influenced pre-service chemistry teachers’ understanding of climate change included school curriculum, particularly chemistry courses, science popularisation aided by information technology, and their informal education through social life experiences. These findings provide insights into pre-service chemistry teachers’ professional development and higher education's approach to teaching about climate change.

Explicit teaching of metacognition, ‘thinking about one's thinking,’ has been shown to improve achievement scores in the general chemistry tests and facilitate the awareness and adoption of metacognitive strategies. However, very few studies have investigated variations in the reported metacognitive strategies employed by college science majors by gender, race/ethnicity, and first-generation status. Additionally, little is known as to whether metacognition instruction makes any difference in closing the reported existing equity gap in the use of effective study strategies across demographic groups. Using a qualitative approach and open-ended questionnaires completed by 259 general chemistry 1 students, we investigated variations in reported (1) study strategies including metacognitive strategies between demographic groups in the general chemistry I course prior to and immediately after a 50 minute metacognition lesson retrospectively, (2) long-term gains in the study strategies and the adoption across the demographic groups over a semester after the metacognition instruction, and (3) transfer of the reported acquired study strategies to other science courses beyond the general chemistry lecture course. The findings showed evidence of equity gaps in the reported use, gains, or adoption of specific study strategies related to lower-order study strategies (LOSSs) and higher-order study strategies (HOSSs) based on gender, race/ethnicity, and first-generation status prior to and after the metacognition instruction. However, the identified equity gaps in LOSSs and HOSSs prior to the metacognition instruction were narrowed or closed with students’ exposure to the study strategies. Additionally, the findings indicated that over half of the study participants from all the demographic groups, except males and first-generation participants reported transfer of the acquired study strategies from the metacognition instruction to other courses. These findings imply the existence of equity gaps in study strategies across demographic groups in general chemistry I. Additionally, explicit teaching of study strategies, including metacognition, can relinquish the existing equity gaps.

The introduction of Green Chemistry (GC) into school science curriculum is considered an important step that encourages students to build connections between chemistry, other school subjects, and different aspects of their daily lives. The concepts associated with GC can be applied throughout the various levels of education with different degrees of complexity and provide a systematic approach to the teaching of science for sustainability. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the specific content that can be associated with the teaching of GC in primary and secondary schools in Chile. This study aims to provide a model of curricular science content for GC school education, utilizing the framework of Educational Reconstruction. The research question was “What links do in-service science teachers and science education researchers establish between GC and the school curriculum?” Specifically, we were interested in comparing science teachers’ and science education researchers’ perceptions of the links between GC and school science subject, school science contents, and crosscutting science concepts. A qualitative approach was employed for data collection and analysis, focusing on the written responses of 20 in-service science teachers and 20 science education researchers. We conclude the study by proposing an empirically based model of curricular content for GC school education (GCSE), comprising three dimensions: the multidisciplinary dimension of school science subjects represented here by chemistry, with the greatest presence, biology, physics, and geology; the intradisciplinary dimension of core disciplinary contents within each school subject; and the interdisciplinary dimension linked to a range of crosscutting concepts for GC.

Student engagement in learning chemistry is arguably a central premise of chemistry education. Most teachers and researchers refer broadly to ‘engagement’ at some point during their work, usually as part of instructional design, reflective classroom practice, measurement of learning outcomes or a combination of these. In fact, as a multidimensional construct, learner engagement for any individual is observed to be fluid and malleable and hence is very difficult to capture. Many readers of our journal may seek to understand an author's position on engagement so that they can connect reported findings to their own contexts. To facilitate this process, in this Editorial article, I briefly visit the basis of the multiple facets of ‘engagement’ aiming to support authors in framing their work on learner engagement more explicitly. I encourage authors to establish and communicate their theoretical perspective and the methodological lens that they have applied in their chemistry education research and practice involving engagement.

A variety of research studies reveal the advantages of actively engaging students in the learning process through collaborative work in the classroom. However, the complex nature of the learning environment in large college general chemistry courses makes it challenging to identify the different factors that affect students’ cognitive and social engagement while working on in-class tasks. To provide insights into this area, we took a closer look at students’ conversations during in-class activities to characterize typical discourse patterns and expressed chemical thinking in representative student groups in samples collected in five different learning environments across four universities. For this purpose, we adapted and applied a ‘Community of Learners’ (CoL) theoretical perspective to characterize group activity through the analysis of student discourse. Within a CoL perspective, the extent to which a group functions as a community of learners is analyzed along five dimensions including Community of Discourse (CoD), Legitimization of Differences (LoD), Building on Ideas (BoI), Reflective Learning (RL), and Community of Practice (CoP). Our findings make explicit the complexity of analyzing student engagement in large active learning environments where a multitude of variables can affect group work. These include, among others, group size and composition, the cognitive level of the tasks, the types of cognitive processes used to complete tasks, and the motivation and willingness of students to substantively engage in disciplinary reasoning. Our results point to important considerations in the design and implementation of active learning environments that engage more students with chemical ideas at higher levels of reasoning.

Secondary school students’ early choices related to staying in the science track define their future decisions to choose chemistry at college. This investigation aims at analyzing the role of gender in students’ causal attributions to choose or abandon chemistry when it first becomes optional in the Spanish educational system. Our analyses uncovered a relevant effect of gender in the students’ decision, boys being more likely to choose physics & chemistry when they face, for the first time, the possibility of continuing or opting out the subject. Besides, students’ causal attributions to the subject relationship with mathematics and to friends are affected by gender regardless of the students’ level of motivation. In turn, there is a gender effect in attributions to friends and media only in the case of highly-motivated students. A multinomial logistic regression model revealed that gender is a strong predictor of the students’ decision. The regression model also uncovered a significant interaction effect between gender and attributions to the subject relationship with mathematics, girls becoming less likely to choose physics & chemistry when the latter increase. Our results highlight the need of working on the students’ and families’ stereotypes and propose gender-balanced teaching models to close the gap between girls’ and boys' attitudes, motivation, and anxiety towards mathematics in the context of physics & chemistry teaching and learning.

The Brønsted–Lowry acid–base model is fundamental when discussing acid and base strength in organic chemistry as many of the reactions include a competing proton transfer reaction. This model requires evaluating chemical stability via a consideration of electronic granularity. The purpose of this study is to identify students’ mental models on acid and base strength in terms of granularity and stability. Fourteen students enrolled in organic chemistry participated in this case study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews including total case comparison tasks on stability, acidity, and basicity. Analysis of data revealed that there were four groups of students differentiated by their reasoning: (1) acid and base strength through structure without association to stability, (2) acid and base strength through electronics without association to stability, (3) acid strength associated with electronically centered stability, and (4) acid and base strength associated with electronically centered stability. This characterization can support teaching and research to promote reasoning that leads to a more consistent mental model across acid and base strength.