Analysis of Trends in Science Electives in the High School Credit System: Focusing on Chemistry I Subjects

Objectives This study investigated and analyzed the tendency of students to choose subjects and the tendency of chemical academic achievement according to science subject selection in the high school credit system. Methods For six months, from March to August 2020, 339 sophomores of S High School located in Gyeongnam were surveyed and analyzed for their perception of subject selection. Among them, a questionnaire was devel-oped to find out the perception of the content of chemistry subjects, and a questionnaire was conducted on 78 people who agreed to participate in the study. In order to analyze the tendency of chemical academic achievement according to science subject selection in the high school credit system, descriptive statistics, cross-analysis, and nonparametric tests were performed with the SPSS 28 program. Results Students selected many of the science elective subjects in the order of 'Chem-Phys-Bio,' 'Chem-Phys-Earth,' and 'Chem-Bio-Earth.' In the content and concept of the Chemistry I subject, students were found to have difficulty understanding concepts such as 'mole,' 'chemical reaction formula,' 'orbital,' etc., and the 'Chem-Phys-Earth' subject group was found to have the most difficulty in understanding the concept of 'mole.' In addition, in the comparison of achievement by elective subject group, the 'Chem-Phys-Bio' subject group showed the highest chemical academic achievement and the 'Chem-Phys-Earth' subject group showed the low-est achievement. Conclusions In the high school credit system, students chose the Science I course independently, but many stu-dents were found to have insufficient understanding of the basic concept of Chemistry I. Therefore, in terms of understanding the concept of chemistry, it is essential to design a teaching-learning process by level so that stu-dents can better understand the basic concept of Chemistry I in the high school credit system.