Chemistry Education Research and Practice最新文献

Instructional explanations in chemistry lessons are planned language products explicitly communicated by the explainer (teacher) to effectively convey specific subject matter (chemical content) to the addressees (students), aligned with didactic principles. The primary aim of these explanations is to enhance students’ understanding of the concepts presented. While previous studies have largely focused on establishing general quality criteria for subject-appropriate and audience-centered instructional explanations, limited research has explored chemistry teachers’ beliefs about instructional explanations in the classroom. This paper addresses this gap by presenting insights from an exploratory investigation into these beliefs within the context of chemistry lessons. Semi-structured, guided interviews were conducted with chemistry teachers (N = 13) from various types of German schools, with data analyzed using Kuckartz and Rädiker's qualitative content analysis methodology. Findings indicate that chemistry teachers hold complex and sometimes contradictory beliefs about the use of instructional explanations. On one hand, they recognize instructional explanations as essential due to the abstract nature of chemistry content (subject matter perspective) and as beneficial for student learning (audience perspective). On the other hand, they express concerns that instructional explanations may foster cognitive passivity among students and reinforce a transmissive approach to knowledge transfer. This insight suggests that teachers’ practical perceptions of instructional explanations differ in some respects from those emphasized in educational research. However, results suggest that teachers’ beliefs about instructional explanations evolve throughout teacher training, becoming more positive at advanced stages. Additionally, insights gained from teacher interviews into the interrelated and simultaneous beliefs about the advantages and disadvantages of instructional explanations highlight the nuanced perspectives that teachers bring to their practice. They demonstrate that teachers use instructional explanations in a deliberate and context-sensitive manner, balancing their effectiveness for specific learning goals with considerations of student autonomy and engagement. Finally, the findings provide relevant implications for teacher education and practice, as well as directions for future research.

Chemistry graduate programs have often been criticized for their perceived overemphasis on preparing students for academic research careers, overlooking the broad range of professional skills necessary in other career sectors. This disparity highlights a need to examine the alignment of skill development in chemistry graduate programs with the varied demands of different career sectors. Further empirical evidence is needed to understand how professional skills are currently being valued and developed in chemistry graduate programs. This study is guided by socialization theory, which serves as a framework for understanding how graduate students acquire the values, attitudes, norms, knowledge, and skills necessary to perform in a professional role. This qualitative investigation examines the perceptions and experiences of 33 chemistry doctoral students from 10 doctorate-granting institutions in the United States to identify how professional skills are valued and developed in chemistry doctoral programs. This study aims to understand not only why graduate students value certain skills, but also how they perceive these skills are valued within their programs. Additionally, this work explores the experiences that shape the professional skill development of chemistry doctoral students. Findings suggest that students personally value professional skills based on their perceived importance for success within their program or future careers. Students’ perceptions of the value of professional skills held by community members (group members and department members) were heavily influenced by the presence of formal development opportunities.

This study explores the relationships among self-efficacy, metacognition, and academic motivation in chemistry, focusing on the moderating roles of gender and locality among Malaysian pre-university students. Using a quantitative approach, data were collected from 556 students and analysed through partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicate that both self-efficacy and metacognition significantly predict academic motivation. Specifically, metacognition had a stronger influence on academic motivation (β = 0.412) than self-efficacy (β = 0.288). Gender significantly moderated the relationship between self-efficacy and academic motivation, with female students showing a stronger link between self-efficacy and motivation than male students (β = −0.07). However, locality did not significantly moderate the relationships between self-efficacy, metacognition, and academic motivation. The combination of self-efficacy and metacognition accounted for 42.3% of the variance in academic motivation (R² = 0.423). These findings provide valuable insights into the factors that drive academic motivation in chemistry education. They suggest that educators emphasise self-efficacy, especially among female students, and integrate metacognitive strategies into the curriculum to enhance pre-university student motivation. Future research should explore the effects of educational interventions targeting self-efficacy and metacognition on academic motivation in chemistry.

Electrostatic potential maps (EPM) have the potential to support organic chemistry students in seeing reaction mechanisms through the perspective of electrostatic attraction. Prior to any pedagogical changes, foundational knowledge on how students use EPMs in particular contexts would be needed to inform how to integrate EPMs into instruction. This study describes an exploration into how organic chemistry students use EPMs during two card sort tasks. Seventeen undergraduate organic chemistry students participated in an interview that included an open and closed card sort. The interviews were inductively coded to identify students’ usage of EPMs, and usage change based on the open sort compared to the closed sort. Viewed from a resources framework, this study demonstrated how students’ use of EPMs shifted depending on the task structure. Variations were observed both among students and within students between tasks in terms of whether EPMs were utilized and when utilized whether information from EPMs were used in isolation or integrated with other chemistry concepts. The results of this study imply that more formal integration of EPMs into instruction and assessment would be needed for students who did not use EPMs. Instruction that models and assesses translation of representations may begin activating a more integrated perspective of EPMs which could be productive for students who had an isolated use of EPMs. The introduction of EPMs independent of specific chemistry tasks (e.g. during a general introduction of molecular representations) could lead some students to focus only on explicit features of the EPM representation and not tie features of the representation to their existing chemical knowledge.

This review systematically examines the impact of using improvised chemicals on students' motivation and performance in chemistry education. It employed a systematic literature review to gather relevant studies from scientific publications. The review utilized the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and included 23 research articles published in reputable journals between 2006 and 2023. These articles were sourced from various electronic databases such as Web of Science, Scopus Index Journal, Google Scholar and ERIC, using keywords and topics taught with improvised materials and chemicals such as improvised chemicals, student motivation, performance, acids, bases, saponification reaction, and thermochemistry. The review highlights the potential of improvised chemicals to enhance hands-on learning, engagement, and academic achievement in chemistry. The collected data were analyzed using document analysis. The results revealed that the use of improvised chemicals enhanced students’ motivation and performance in chemistry. The findings suggested that improvised chemicals offer a cost-effective alternative to standard laboratory materials, reduce costs and promote deeper learning particularly in resource-constrained settings. The review identifies key gaps in the literature, such as the need for further research into long-term effects and teacher preparedness, and recommends support from educational stakeholders for integrating improvised chemicals into curricula to improve learning outcomes in developing countries.

In this study, we investigate how young students can make use of their own disciplinary drawings to support transitions between everyday and scientific discourses of water. The empirical data consists of video-recorded stimulated recall interviews with six student pairs (age 8 years), conducted six months after they had been introduced to a water theme that included disciplinary drawing techniques. During the interviews, we provided students with their drawings as recall material. To stimulate a stalled discussion further or to support a new line of thought, we also asked supporting questions and provided the students with plastic models of water molecules, and a bottle of water. To trace their reasoning over time during the interview, the empirical material was used to construct semantic profiles for all student pairs underpinned by Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Our findings show that most students used their drawings to bridge everyday experiences and scientific explanations of phenomena involving water. The plastic models and the water bottle however had varying effects, sometimes leading to adding a scientific discourse, and sometimes leading to off-topic reasoning. The students generally needed adult guidance to use their own drawings for navigating between everyday and scientific reasoning. However, our findings also show that some students were able to independently use their drawings to move between everyday and scientific discourse, in a way that suggests a gradual deepening of their understanding of the chemical properties of water. Based on these findings, we advocate for emergent disciplinary drawing, in combination with guided discussions, as an age-appropriate method for supporting primary students to navigate between everyday and scientific discourses in chemistry class. This approach could ensure that the educational value of students' creative efforts when drawing extends beyond the moment of creation, to also foster a richer language that can open for new ways of understanding and making sense of the world.

Creative exercises (CEs) consist of open-ended prompts to which students provide a series of relevant, distinct, and accurate statements, thus requiring that students make connections between concepts. In this study, CEs were incorporated into a one-semester Survey of Organic Chemistry course to identify what connections between chemistry concepts students made and what incorrect conceptions or misconceptions about chemistry students held. Students (N = 79) enrolled in the course first completed a practice CE as an in-class group activity followed by individually responding to a CE bonus problem on each of their four course exams. The number of different concepts students addressed for each CE increased over the semester, indicating that students made increasing content connections about course material; however, misconceptions about early concepts, such as nomenclature and assigning configurations, remained consistent throughout the semester. Furthermore, the CEs were found to be instrumental in shedding light on misconceptions and knowledge structures of students across varying performance levels. Overall, students reported that they viewed the CEs favorably and would like to see CEs incorporated in future courses.

As students progress through the chemistry curriculum, their interaction with and understanding of instrumentation increases. Integral to this educational journey is the acquisition of skills in interpreting data generated by a wide variety of instruments. Recent efforts have aimed at delineating student assumptions and cognitive constraints in the interpretation of spectral data across various educational levels, notably focusing within organic chemistry settings. However, there is currently limited work focusing on how upper-level undergraduate chemistry students engage with spectral data, particularly pertaining to infrared (IR) spectra. In this qualitative study, we investigate the strategies employed as upper-level undergraduate analytical chemistry students and graduate chemistry students interpret IR spectroscopic data, directly engaging in the scientific practice of analyzing and interpreting data. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted using one task from a larger mixed-methods eye tracking study. Guided by data-frame theory, the findings of this research underscore the critical role of instructor modeling in facilitating the integration of data and frame to derive meaningful conclusions when interpreting IR spectra. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the interpretation of spectral data, thereby informing pedagogical practices in chemistry education.

Students often perceive learning organic chemistry as a tremendous struggle, linking the invisible molecular level to the visible symbolic representations. Memorising reactions and not knowing how to approach or propose a reaction mechanism differs from what we want students to experience in an organic chemistry classroom. How do we shift this focus from rote memorisation to developing representational competence, enabling students to meaningfully engage with organic mechanisms to connect underlying molecular behaviour with observable chemical phenomena? In 2015, I looked back at the early work in organic chemistry education research to understand the state-of-the-art and potential missing research gaps worth exploring. Various research strands looking into student mechanistic reasoning, their representational competence, and how variables in the classroom impact their learning have developed since then. Ten years later, the question arises of how far we have come to understand the complex interplay of learning organic chemistry. Have we better understood how to help students to link the visible to the invisible? What happened to the iceberg of organic chemistry? How has our perspective on learning organic chemistry grown and acknowledged the interplay of multiple variables shaping the learning experience? In this perspective, the current state-of-the-art in organic chemistry education research is revisited by looking back on the achievements and advancements of the last decade and opening the discussion for potential future research endeavours.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the shift to online learning, including a change from paper-based (Type-P) exams to online, open-book (Type-O) exams. This study investigated the impact of the sudden shift from Type-P to Type-O exams on the nature of exam questions, and the students’ and academics’ experiences. Type-P and Type-O exams were analysed, focussing on question type, and Bloom's Taxonomy classifications. Type-O exams had a decrease in drawing questions in favour of short answer questions, and a slight shift to lower-order thinking was seen. Other changes were mostly insignificant. Semi-structured interviews with students revealed the main origins of stress for Type-O exams related to technological failures. Students noted they prepared notes for ease of searching for Type-O exams, and optimal memorisation for Type-P exams. Students who had taken both exam types revealed a preference for Type-P exams, as they preferred drawing answers. Semi-structured interviews with academics revealed that writing questions for Type-O exams required more thought to avoid questions with searchable answers. However, academics enjoyed the conveniences of the online format, which includes the automatic marking of multiple-choice questions. Academics appeared to have an astute awareness of the students’ experience with the differing exam types. Our findings suggest that Type-O exams could be successfully integrated into university systems, however there are important considerations that should be addressed.