Volume 2, Issue 1

This study introduces the Kitchen Chemistry (KC) course and its influences on chemistry education as a whole. KC is considered to be a life-relevant learning environment that engages learners in science through the pursuit of personally relevant and meaningful goals. KC, as a form of interdisciplinary learning, aims to develop boundary-crossing skills and to support the development of pupils’ scientific thinking. The purpose of this research was to determine how KC as a context-based teaching approach applies to chemistry education and what it offers to chemistry teaching and teacher education. We found that KC gave lower secondary school pupils the opportunity to understand the chemical phenomena in a familiar context. Teachers of visiting groups saw that integration is the challenge: pupils often see the subjects of chemistry and home economics as separate entities. The chemistry education students highlighted real-world connections to chemistry concepts and contexts. They also found KC to be an interesting form of teaching chemistry. According to the KC course teachers, the students were motivated and excited, and provided positive feedback on the course. These findings suggest that teachers and teacher education students need to be guided in actively using integration.

Low vision or blindness are defined as visual impairment, which is the decreased ability to see to a degree that causes problems in education as well as in daily life. Students with visual impairment struggle with learning concepts in science due to using visual objects such as figures, equations and graphs. But the science could be made more accessible to those students through collaboration and specific adaptation in both the science classroom and laboratory by providing simple adaptations or doing some essential modifications to help them gaining experience with measuring, balancing and weighing a variety of materials with simple adaptations or modifications. This study aims to design activities to teach heat and temperature concepts to visually impaired students which are found difficult to comprehend even by the sighted students. For this purpose, instructional material that emphasizing the sense of touch and interactive science activities were designed to make science more accessible to 8th grade students in a special school for visually impaired. The activities basically consist of simple, economical and easily accessible everyday materials. Nearly all of the students indicated that they are quite satisfied if all courses would be taught by activities developed in line with their individual needs.

Two different approaches for chemistry education are presented in this paper: teaching and learning chemistry through contemporary research and using a historical approach. Essential dimensions in science education are used to study the differences between the two approaches. This includes the rationale of each approach, the scientific content, as well as students’ and teachers’ perspectives. At first glance, the two approaches look different and even contradict each other. However, a deeper investigation shows that there are common themes that connect the two approaches. Chemistry education is used to represent the historical approach and Nanoscale Science and Teachnology (NST) in chemistry education is used as the context for learning science through a contemporary research approach. The paper can be used by chemistry teachers as a preliminary guide for consideration of adapting one of these approaches in their class.

In the present study we report the construction of a simple atomic emission spectrophotometer and we describe its computer interface and its calibration procedure. The final instrument is employed for the detection of the presence of metal ions in commercially available drugs. The cost of the whole construction is low and it can be readily applied within the secondary education chemistry curricula in order to strengthen students’ engagement and understanding of a modern analytical technique that is based on the well known flame tests.

The paper describes a curriculum innovation project for integrating the sustainability-oriented socio-scientific issue of phosphate recovery into undergraduate chemistry education. Justification for the topic is derived from the importance of responsible use of phosphates as fertilizers for achieving some of the sustainable development goals issued by the United Nations in 2015, but also by the consideration of the phosphorus biochemical flow into the environment in the concept of the world’s planetary boundaries. Integration of the topic into undergraduate general chemistry was operated by a digital learning environment providing the base for a transdisciplinary approach towards the topic. Findings are reported from an implementation case in a research university in the USA.

In a preceding publication (Tsaparlis, G., Pappa, E. T., & Byers, B. (2018). Teaching and learning chemical bonding: Research-based evidence for misconceptions and conceptual difficulties experienced by students in upper secondary schools and the effect of an enriched text. Chemistry Education Research and Practice , 19 (4), 1253–1269), we reviewed previous studies on students’ misconceptions and conceptual difficulties with the topic of chemical bonding and tested the knowledge of tenth-grade Greek students on certain key aspects of bonding. In addition, we presented an enriched teaching text on this topic for the tenth grade and examined its effectiveness with regard to the same aspects of bonding. In the present study, we review earlier studies, which made proposals concerning the teaching of this topic, and provide some proposals of our own, based on the findings of our previous study. We recommend that a spiral curriculum spanning all three upper-secondary grades should be adopted. A learning progressions approach, employing lower and upper anchors of relevant scientific knowledge is considered, and a proposed list of potential core concepts, lever concepts, and stepping-stones are presented. Finally, the pros and cons of a modern qualitative quantum mechanical approach to bonding are considered.

Lewis structures are the simplest model for students to communicate chemical information using chemical symbolic language. Thus, competence in Lewis structures is essential to progress in the study of chemistry. Proposals on how to teach/learn Lewis structures with inert rules abound, nonetheless, scant related educational research has been conducted. The present study is part of a larger investigation into the conceptualisation and use of Lewis structures by novices and experts. This study analysed data from a cross-sectional, 122-participant sample of chemistry majors at a large university in Costa Rica. Participants were prompted to draw Lewis structures, which rendered information on their representational competence. Analysis of mistakes in their representations shed light on participants’ conceptualisation of Lewis structures. Responses to open-ended items further contributed in elucidating their conceptualisation. Findings suggest: (a) participants’ competence to draw Lewis structures is deficient throughout the major; (b) participants relied significantly on memory and familiarity and not on understanding to draw Lewis structures; (c) most participants’ limited understanding of Lewis structures stems from their using mental images and propositional representations for Lewis structures instead of mental models. Use of appropriate mental models could enable individuals to explain and predict chemical behaviour based on Lewis structures.

Distance education began as correspondence courses in the 1700s, chiefly to connect rural communities with secondary and post-secondary educational institutions located in major cities. Since then, owing to the overwhelming improvements in communication technologies over the past two centuries, distance education is now well-established and is a major educational approach employed throughout the world. This paper will include a brief overview of the history of distance education in general and a description of some of the author’s personal experiences with respect to distance teaching of university-level Chemistry courses since he began his academic career as a professor over 50 years ago.