This research aimed to explore the conceptual structure of chemical equilibrium in upper-secondary school students using factor analysis. Research on chemistry education has shown that chemical equilibrium is an important but difficult-to-understand topic. Exploring the conceptual structure of chemical equilibrium among students will help chemistry researchers and educators to conduct more targeted teaching practices. Based on a survey of chemistry research and teaching practice experts, a high-quality concept pool composed of 24 relevant concepts was developed. Next, a survey involving a total of over 700 twelfth-grade students from five upper-secondary schools was conducted, and a factor analysis was utilized to determine the conceptual structure. The results showed that a three-factor model and a five-factor model with 15 relevant concepts were all accepted as the conceptual structure for students. The new form of conceptual structure in this research helps understand the features and categories in students’ latent organization of concepts. Also, it may be revealed that factor analysis can be utilized as an approach to exploring students’ conceptual structure. Keywords: chemical equilibrium, chemistry education, conceptual structure, factor analysis

This research aimed to explore the upper-secondary school chemistry teachers’ and students’ conceptual structures of atomic structure by using multidimensional scaling. Atomic structure is considered to be one of the most difficult concepts in upper-secondary school chemistry course so that the conceptual structure regarding atomic structure held by the learner is necessary to examine. Based on a questionnaire survey for upper-secondary school chemistry teachers and university chemistry professors, 40 concepts were selected as a useful concept pool of atomic structure. Then, the conceptual structures and the specific classifications of concepts from 168 upper-secondary school chemistry teachers and 336 tenth-grade students were investigated by multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. The results showed that the 3-D solutions were appropriate for the conceptual structures of teachers and students respectively. Next, the conceptual structure of teachers utilized as an evaluation criterion was more scientific than that of students. The conceptual structure of students with high academic achievement was more scientific than that of the low achievers. Multidimensional scaling utilized to explore students’ conceptual structure of scientific concepts can provide a new and benefic form of evidence to understand the concept learning outcome of students. Keywords: atomic structure, conceptual structure, hierarchical cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling

On the basis of the model of the interactive relationship between teachers and curriculum materials, this research proposed the four dimensions of the interaction of chemistry teachers with curriculum materials: ‘routine use’, ‘scientific inquiry’, ‘STSE’ and ‘teacher learning’. An instrument with good validity and reliability was developed. Through a questionnaire survey of 208 junior high school chemistry teachers in three areas in Guangzhou, China, it was found that teachers thought they had a good interaction with curriculum materials, but the level of interaction is not very high. Teachers from different administrative areas were significantly different in the dimensions of ‘STSE’ and ‘teacher learning’; teachers with different years of teaching experience showed significant differences in the dimensions of ‘routine use’, ‘scientific inquiry’ and ‘STSE’. There was no interaction effect between the two variables of the areas and years of teaching. Designing educative curriculum materials and developing teacher training activities in terms of curriculum use are recommended to further improve teachers’ ability to use curriculum materials. Keywords: curriculum materials, curriculum use, chemistry teaching, survey research.

Chemical equilibrium is so important domain knowledge in chemistry that the corresponding organisation of concepts in students has been an interesting but unsolved issue. A deeper understanding of how students organise the relevant concepts in long-term memory is beneficial to develop more targeted teaching practices. This research utilized the reaction time technique as a new approach to exploring upper-secondary school students’ organisation of concepts regarding chemical equilibrium. A category judgment task involving 247 Chinese twelfth-grade students from two upper-secondary schools was conducted. The results showed that a significant difference was between the reaction time of concept dimensions. The mean reaction time of the dimension ‘reversible reaction’ was the shortest, but the dimension ‘representation of state’ had the longest mean reaction time. Next, there was no significant difference in the organisation of concepts between students studying chemistry at different levels of academic achievement. These findings provide a new and essential picture to deeply understand the organisation of concepts regarding chemical equilibrium and help focus on the relations between some relevant concepts. This research represents that the reaction time technique can be utilized in the research on organisation of science concepts. Keywords: category judgment task, chemical equilibrium, organisation of concepts, reaction time