A total of 502 randomly selected incoming freshmen students were asked to answer Chemical Concepts Inventory questionnaire containing 22 multiple choice questions. These students graduated from a total of 150 private and public high schools. The sample is composed of 273 female and 229 male students. The Chemical Concepts Inventory developed by Mulford was meant to measure students' conceptual understanding of common topics taken in a general chemistry class as well as alternate conceptions on these topics. Results indicated that these sampled high school graduates were not able to fully master some basic concepts in chemistry. Female and male students have mean scores of 4.63 and 4.75 respectively. Further analysis using t test of independent samples revealed that the mean scores did not differ significantly when students are grouped according to gender and type of school. This may indicate that these students did not fully understand the concepts covered in the inventory during their high school chemistry.

The curricular revamp in the Philippine's Basic Education aimed to improve the learning outcomes of Filipino Students. In science education, this revision in the curriculum posed a mismatch in the past teacher preparation and current basic education science education curriculum. As a response, a flexible training program was conducted to address this curriculum gap. This study investigated the improvement of science teaching efficacy utilizing rapid project monitoring through a pre-experimental research design. Standardized adopted questionnaires were utilized before and after the training program. At the end of the training program, teachers were found to have improved in all aspects of science teaching efficacy except in the personal science teaching efficacy, which indicates success in achieving the training objectives. In addition, all targeted concepts for science teaching efficacy were improved after the training. The results of this present work support the notion that professional development programs are potential ways to address curricular gaps in teacher and curriculum mismatch. It is recommended that further studies be conducted to examine science teachers' experiences during the training program to understand how it contributes to the development of their science teaching efficacy.