This study aims to develop and validate a new instrument for measuring chemistry teachers’ perceptions of Pedagogical Content Knowledge for teaching Chemistry Core Competencies (PCK_CCC) in the context of new Chinese chemistry curriculum reform. The five constructs and the initial 17 items in the new instrument were contextualized by the PCK pentagon model (Park S. and Oliver J. S., (2008), J. Res. Sci. Teach., 45(7), 812–834.) with the notions of the Senior High School Chemistry Curriculum Standards (Ministry of Education, P. R. China, 2017). 210 chemistry teachers from a University-Government-School initiative voluntarily participated in this study. The findings from item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis provide sufficient empirical evidence to support the convergent and discriminant validity of the instrument. The concurrent validity of the instrument was confirmed by testing mean differences among teacher demographic groups. The high Cronbach's coefficient alpha values show good internal consistency reliability of the instrument. Integrating the evidence from theory and data, we documented a valid and reliable PCK_CCC instrument with five constructs consisting of 16 items. This study provides a thorough process for developing and validating instruments that address teacher perceptions of their PCK in a particular subject domain. The valid and reliable PCK_CCC instrument would be beneficial for teacher education researchers and teacher professional programs.
Just a few decades ago, books were mostly used as educational media, while posters, various mechanical models, etc. were used as educational visual illustrations. Laboratory experiments for teaching chemistry, physics, biology, etc. were conducted in schools and colleges using real materials. Today the situation is drastically changed and all this has been forgotten. Modern computer teaching technologies are being rapidly introduced in the educational space replacing old tehcnology with hypertexts, e-books and textbooks, tutorials and many other forms and contents.
A brief review of the American system of chemical education, at the highschool to junior college level, with emphasis on the content and format of teaching lab experiments. Lab experiment is a mandatory part of any highschool chemistry. In recent years, Vernier’s methods, unified equipment and computer software have been widely used as the basis for conducting a training experiment. The content and organization of laboratory workshops in general and organic chemistry at a number of college-level educational institutions on the basis of the author’s own teaching experience were considered.
This article presents new algorithms for inferring users’ activities in a class of flexible and open-ended educational software called exploratory learning environments (ELE). Such settings provide a rich educational environment for students, but challenge teachers to keep track of students’ progress and to assess their performance. This article presents techniques for recognizing students activities in ELEs and visualizing these activities to students. It describes a new plan recognition algorithm that takes into account repetition and interleaving of activities. This algorithm was evaluated empirically using two ELEs for teaching chemistry and statistics used by thousands of students in several countries. It was able to outperform the state-of-the-art plan recognition algorithms when compared to a gold-standard that was obtained by a domain-expert. We also show that visualizing students’ plans improves their performance on new problems when compared to an alternative visualization that consists of a step-by-step list of actions.
Information technologies in teaching chemistry to future specialists in automated engineering