Understanding of words and symbols by chemistry university students in Croatia

This article reports on a study conducted in Croatia on students' understanding of scientific words and representations, as well as everyday words used in chemistry teaching. A total of 82 undergraduate chemistry students and 36 pre-service chemistry teachers from the Faculty of Science, University of Split, were involved. Students' understanding of language was probed using a diagnostic instrument with various types of tasks: creation of a scientifically sensible sentence using the key word provided without context; explanation of the meaning of a word provided in a contextual sentence; selection of the appropriate usage of a term from multiple-choice options; explanation of the meaning of a word provided without context. With every kind of task, evidence of inadequate understanding of many terms and symbols was found. Accordingly, it cannot be presumed that students in Croatia, either undergraduates or graduates, understand well the meanings of scientific words, symbolic representations or everyday words that are used in teaching and learning chemistry. There are considerable differences in the extent of understanding, from word to word, and symbol to symbol. Some of the findings are in common with other studies conducted in English-speaking countries, and some are particular to the Croatian language – especially due to students' confusion in the cases of similar sounding words with different meanings, and the different meanings of words in the everyday and science contexts. Recommendations are made for teaching that involves specific attention to learning about the language associated with topics, through reflective discussion and in formative assessments. Issues of knowledge transfer from research to teachers' pedagogical content knowledge, as well as considerations for further research, are discussed.

Download Full-text

CLASSIFICAÇÃO DAS SUBSTÂNCIAS QUÍMICAS: UM CONCEITO POUCO EXPLORADO NA EDUCAÇÃO QUÍMICA

Química Nova ◽

10.21577/0100-4042.20170667 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Cintia Lima ◽

José Silva

Keyword(s):

Teaching And Learning ◽

Intellectual Development ◽

Chemistry Teaching ◽

Teaching Literature ◽

Chemical Substances ◽

Chemistry Students ◽

Chemistry Textbooks ◽

Chemical Concepts ◽

History Of

The classification of chemical substances is a concept little explored in Chemistry teaching literature and in Chemistry textbooks at higher and secondary levels. The aim of this paper is to discuss theoretically the importance and contributions of this concept for teaching and learning Chemistry. The History of Chemistry reveals that the chemical criteria for classifying materials came up with the modern concepts of chemical element and chemical reaction, which gave rise to the notion of chemical similarity. Later, such similarity was related to molecular structure through functional groups. The classes of substances are related throughout chemical reactions, during which substances of given classes are transformed into substances of other classes, constituting a wide network. The classification of chemical substances can contribute to the intellectual development of Chemistry students, in order to study it, it becomes necessary to understand its theoretical foundation, as well as its characteristics of objectivity, completeness, simplicity and prediction. In this sense, one can contribute to the stimulation of perception, attention and abstraction t hat are typical of the chemical ways of thinking and communicating necessary for learning the chemical concepts linked to classification.

Download Full-text

Undergraduate chemistry instructors’ perspectives on their students’ metacognitive development

Chemistry Education Research and Practice ◽

10.1039/d0rp00136h ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Amber Heidbrink ◽

Melissa Weinrich

Keyword(s):

Pedagogical Content Knowledge ◽

Content Knowledge ◽

Chemistry Education ◽

Metacognitive Skills ◽

College Level ◽

Pedagogical Content ◽

Chemistry Students ◽

Metacognitive Development ◽

Undergraduate Chemistry ◽

Qualitative Interview Study

Metacognition is an important skill for undergraduate chemistry students, but there has been scant research investigating chemistry instructors’ perspectives of metacognition and the development of their students’ metacognition. Since undergraduate instructors have a wide influence over what happens in their courses, it is crucial to investigate their understanding of metacognition, and discern whether they value metacognitive development for their students. This qualitative interview study explored the perspectives of seventeen chemistry instructors who taught chemistry at the college level from six different institutions across Colorado. The interviews were coded deductively according to Zohar and Dori's definitions of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills, and inductively for themes through reflexive thematic analysis. These interviews provided a window into these instructors’ personal pedagogical content knowledge (pPCK) and how it influenced their enacted pedagogical content knowledge (ePCK) in relation to their students’ metacognition development. The results include a discussion of how these chemistry instructors valued their students’ metacognition, how they currently develop their students’ metacognition, and their suggestions for improving the development of metacognition in undergraduate chemistry education. Based on the results of this analysis, activities that indirectly target students’ metacognition may be more easily adopted by instructors, and more explicit awareness may be beneficial.

Download Full-text

O ensino de equilíbrio químico a partir das etapas da situação de estudo: um relato de caso vivenciado por licenciandos em formação

Revista Brasileira de Educação em Ciências e Educação Matemática ◽

10.33238/rebecem.2020.v.4.n.1.23721 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 137-158

Author(s):

Evandro Bonifácio ◽

Ana Beatriz Da Silva ◽

Ana Paula Hilário Gregório ◽

Enio De Lorena Stanzani

Keyword(s):

Undergraduate Students ◽

Chemical Equilibrium ◽

Teaching And Learning ◽

Basic Education ◽

Learning Processes ◽

State School ◽

Chemistry Students ◽

Undergraduate Chemistry ◽

Second Year ◽

Attention To Students

Resumo: O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar o desenvolvimento de uma Situação de Estudo (SE) para o ensino de Equilíbrio Químico, evidenciando as potencialidades dessa proposta para os processos de ensino e de aprendizagem na Educação Básica. A SE foi elaborada por dois licenciandos de um curso de Licenciatura em Química e desenvolvida em um colégio da rede pública com a participação de aproximadamente 30 estudantes do 2º ano do Ensino Médio. Dentre as atividades propostas na SE, os estudantes responderam questões relacionadas à situação em estudo, as quais foram coletadas para posterior análise, de acordo com os pressupostos da Análise de Conteúdo. Como resultado, destacamos o envolvimento dos estudantes nas atividades propostas, sendo possível constatar a reelaboração conceitual nas respostas dadas ao longo das aulas, embora alguns estudantes ainda apresentem dificuldades relacionadas à explicação e compreensão dos fenômenos químicos estudados com relação ao nível submicroscópico.Palavras-chave: Estágio Supervisionado; Situação de Estudo; Equilíbrio Químico. A proposition for the teaching of chemical equilibrium from the stages of a study situation: a case report experienced by undergraduate students in trainingAbstract: This study aims to analyze the development of a Study Situation (SS) for the teaching of Chemical Equilibrium, highlighting the potentiality of this proposition for teaching and learning processes in Basic Education. The SS was elaborated by two undergraduate Chemistry students and developed in a state school with the participation of approximately 30 students in their second year of High School. Among the activities proposed in the SS, students answered questions related to the situation under study. These answers were collected for further analysis, according to the assumptions of Content Analysis. As a result, we draw attention to students' involvement in the activities. Although some students still presented difficulties related to the explanation and understanding of the chemical phenomena studied in the submicroscopic level, it was possible to verify the conceptual re-elaboration in the answers given during the classes.Keywords: Supervised Internship; Study Situation; Chemical Equilibrium.

Download Full-text

Moral Concerns are Differentially Observable in Language

10.31234/osf.io/uqmty ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Brendan Kennedy ◽

Mohammad Atari ◽

Aida Mostafazadeh Davani ◽

Joseph Hoover ◽

Ali Omrani ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Moral Foundations ◽

Moral Concern ◽

Language Usage ◽

Moral Domain ◽

The Everyday ◽

Fairness Concerns ◽

English Speaking ◽

Selection Of

Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While it is often used in moral psychology as an intermediary between researcher and participant, much of the human experience that occurs through language — our relationships, conversations, and, in general, the everyday transmission of our thoughts — has yet to be studied in association with moral concerns. In order to understand how moral concerns relate to observed language usage, we paired Facebook status updates (N = 107,798) from English-speaking participants (n = 2,691) with their responses on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity concerns. Overall, we found consistent evidence that participants’ self-reported moral concerns can be predicted from their language, though the magnitude of this effect varied considerably among concerns. Across a diverse selection of Natural Language Processing methods, cross-validated R2 values ranged from 0.04 for predicting Fairness concerns to 0.21for predicting Purity concerns. In follow-up analyses, each moral concern was found to be related to distinct patterns of relational, emotional, and social language. Our results are the first finding relating internally valid measures of moral concerns to observations of language, motivating several new avenues for exploring and investigating how the moral domain intersects with language usage.

Download Full-text

Representations of chemical phenomena in secondary school chemistry textbooks

Chemistry Education Research and Practice ◽

10.1039/c8rp00191j ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 146-159 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Johnson Enero Upahi ◽

Umesh Ramnarain

Keyword(s):

Secondary School ◽

Teaching And Learning ◽

Learning Resources ◽

Chemistry Teaching ◽

Intrinsic Nature ◽

Symbolic Representations ◽

Chemistry Textbooks ◽

Mixed Representation ◽

Different Levels ◽

Chemical Representations

The difficulties encountered by students in learning chemistry range from human factors to the intrinsic nature of chemistry. To enhance students’ understanding of chemistry, there is a wide consensus within the community of chemistry educators on the importance of and need to integrate different levels of representations in chemistry teaching and learning resources. As learning resources, textbooks are ubiquitous and usually readily available to both students and teachers. Therefore, this study investigated how chemical phenomena are represented or depicted in secondary school chemistry textbooks. We adopted a rubric developed by Gkitziaet al.(Gkitzia V., Salta K. and Tzougraki C., (2011), Development and application of suitable criteria for the evaluation of chemical representations in school textbooks,Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.,12, 5–14) to analyze the textbooks for types of representations; relatedness of chemical representations to text; and the appropriateness of captions. The results indicated the dominance of symbolic representations, followed by sub-microscopic, then hybrid and multiple representations. In all three textbooks, there was no evidence of mixed representation. While many of the chemical representations were completely related to the texts, some were unlinked. The germaneness of suitable captions in textbooks is in the explicit, brief and concise explanation that captions give to an entire representation. While our results indicated that more than half of the representations had suitable captions, there was evidence of representations that were problematic and had no captions. The implication of these results for students’ cognitive load, and the need for textbook-users to explore alternative resources that depict phenomena in 2D or 3D representations are discussed.

Download Full-text

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING TITRATION CURVES IN ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

Periódico Tchê Química ◽

10.52571/ptq.v17.n34.2020.230_p34_pgs_213_219.pdf ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (34) ◽

pp. 213-219

Author(s):

Roberto FERNANDEZ-MAESTRE

Keyword(s):

Analytical Chemistry ◽

Acid Base ◽

Acceptable Error ◽

Chemistry Teachers ◽

Chemistry Students ◽

Undergraduate Chemistry ◽

Titration Curves ◽

Chemistry Textbooks ◽

Ultimate Purpose ◽

Selection Of

Titration curves are an essential subject of an Analytical Chemistry course. The main objective of calculating titration curves is the selection of an indicator for such titrations. The calculation of titration errors is imperative because they establish if a given indicator can be used for a given titration. This study reviews the available literature on titration curves and calculating their errors. Its purpose is to draw attention to the importance of undergraduate chemistry students having competencies to determine the titration errors rather than skills to build titration curves as the ultimate purpose of these curves is to determine the failure committed when using a given indicator to assess their endpoints. It is shown that the pH and potential calculation at the equivalence point in acid-base and redox titrations, respectively, are not required to choose the titration indicator, one that yields an acceptable error according to the type of application needed. Methods to calculate these errors in the four main types of titrations are presented; those for complexometric and precipitation titrations are simpler than in the literature. Here, it is also demonstrated that calculating points immediately after and before the curve inflection are more critical for this selection in these two types of titrations. Also, it is deducted that complexometric and precipitation curves are not required to select indicators for these titrations. These demonstrations are essential because analytical chemistry teachers may disregard teaching important topics by spending time calculating unnecessary titration curves (complexometric and precipitation titrations) or additional points of titration curves (redox and acid-base titrations) when the calculation of titration errors of these reactions is more critical. Most analytical chemistry textbooks neglect this topic. Undergraduate chemistry programs should focus more on calculating titration errors than on the construction of titration curves.

Download Full-text

Implementing Self Access Material for Promoting Learner Autonomy In Teaching ESP

ELLITE Journal of English Language Literature and Teaching ◽

10.32528/ellite.v1i1.163 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Welly Kuswanto

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Learning Environment ◽

Research Design ◽

Teaching And Learning ◽

Learner Autonomy ◽

Material Development ◽

Qualitative Research Design ◽

The Everyday ◽

Online Sources ◽

Selection Of

This research used qualitative research design. Fraenkel and Wallen (2006) define qualitative research as documenting or portraying the everyday experience of individuals by observing and interviewing them. In this case, the researcher interviewed, observed teaching and learning ESP process and documentation by collecting document needed. Finally, Teacher as facilitator is easy to develop learners autonomy in teaching ESP by utilizing Self Access Material in form of providing relevant videos, providing software and online sources, producing in-house material development, making authentic podcasts accessible, promoting CALL, turning workshop recordings into self-access activities and using authentic music resources. By fostering self access material and implement it by using nine strategies namely setting objectives, selection of materials, methods, teacher’s role, teacher-learner relationship, learning environment, homework, presentation and talks and evaluation, teacher is able to trigger the learners to develop the ESP materials given.Keywords: Learner autonomy, self access material, ESP.

Download Full-text