The development of an open-ended drawing tool: an alternative diagnostic tool for assessing students' understanding of the particulate nature of matter

Abstract

Many studies in the chemical education literature report students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and the difficulty they present for future learning. In this paper, we review existing diagnostic tools used to uncover students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and suggest that there are two fundamental issues with such instruments, namely, the breadth of topics and concepts assessed and the reliance on forced choice responses. We argue that while existing instruments provide a way to assess students' overall understanding of chemical concepts, they cannot assess depth of understanding of any single concept, such as the particulate nature of matter -one of the central, organizing ideas in chemistry. Instead, we propose using qualitative approaches that utilize drawing tasks as an alternative diagnostic tool to uncover students' underlying struggles with fundamental chemistry concepts. Using this approach, we investigated college students' ability to balance chemical equations and draw appropriate particulate representations of those reactions. Emerging categories from students' particulate drawings were coded into several subcategories and revealed a number of underlying issues, such as lack of understanding of appropriate relationships between reacting species in solution, oxidation numbers, states and valences of species, the characteristics and nature of ions in solids and differences between ionic and covalent bonds. We describe these findings and consider the implications of qualitative-based diagnostics for instruction and science learning as a formative assessment tool.

Diagnostic assessment of student misconceptions about the particulate nature of matter from ontological perspective

“…In their study, Nyachwaya, Mohamed, Roehrig, Wood, Kern and Schneider (2011) developed an open-ended drawing instrument to assess students' understandings of the PNM.…”

Öğretmen Adaylarının “Bilgisayar” Kavramı Konusundaki Bilişsel Yapılarının Belirlenmesi

“…These techniques are employed not only to determine students' knowledge; but also to determine the relations that students establish between concepts, students' cognitive structures, whether they manage to accomplish meaningful learning by linking existing knowledge with new information, the extents to which they make sense of the operation of events in the natural life by associating them with their conceptual knowledge, and alternative conceptions they develop. In this respect, in order to determine the cognitive structures and alternative conceptions related to the concept of computer; two-step multiple-choice tests (Odom and Barrow, 1995, Tekkaya, 2003), drawings (Ainsworth et al, 2011Cinici, 2013;Nyachwayaa et al, 2011;Patrick and Tunnicliffe, 2010;Yayla and Eyceyurt, 2011), interviews (Kose, 2008), free word association test (Dove et al, 1999;Ercan et al, 2010;Koseoglu and Bayir, 2011;Kurt, 2013), concept maps (Novak and Gowin, 1993), prediction-observation-explanation (POE) (Liew and Treagust, 1998), along with structured grid, diagnostic tree,…”

Öğretmen Adaylarının “Çözünürlük” Konusuna Yönelik Alternatif Kavramlarının Belirlenmesi

“…Kimya konuları ile ilgili alternatif kavramların ortaya çıkarılmasının amaçlandığı çalışmalarda çizimlerin (Blanco & Prieto, 1997;Nyachwaya, Mohamed, Roehrig, Wood, Kern & Schneider, 2011;Sanger, 2000), çizimlere dayanan görüşmelerin (Adbo & Taber, 2009) kullanıldığı, fakat çözünürlük konusunda çizimlerin az kullanıldığı (Çalık, Ayas & Ünal, 2006), hikâye ve şiirlerin ise kullanılmadığı görülmektedir. Şiir, insanların yaşadıklarını ve hayal ettiklerini güzel ve etkileyici bir biçimde yazıya dökme sanatıdır (Karadeniz & Gürsoy, 2014).…”