Understandings and misunderstandings of eighth graders of five chemistry concepts found in textbooks

Abstract

The research reported in this study was designed to answer three questions: (a) What misconceptions do eighth grade students have concerning the chemistry concepts from their textbooks. (b) How is reasoning ability related to misconceptions concerning chemistry concepts. (c) How effective are textbooks in teaching an understanding of chemistry concepts? Five chemistry concepts were used in the study: chemical change, dissolution, conservation of atoms, periodicity, and phase change. Problems concerning the five concepts were given to 247 eighth‐grade students in order to assess the students' degree of understanding of chemistry concepts and to identify specific misconceptions. Two pencil‐and‐paper Piaget‐type tasks were used to assess intellectual level. A comparison of intellectual level and scores on the chemistry concepts showed moderate correlations. However, the small number of formal operational students in the sample makes these results inconclusive. A study of the level of understanding of the five chemistry concepts and the nature of the misconceptions held by students indicate a general failure of textbooks to teach a reasonable understanding of chemistry concepts.

The impact of designing and evaluating molecular animations on how well middle school students understand the particulate nature of matter

“…To develop an in-depth understanding of the particulate nature of matter, students need to possess related scientiÞc knowledge such as the molecular constitution of a given substance (Abraham, Grzybowski, Renner, & Marek, 1992;Nakhleh, 1992;Nakhleh, Samarapungavan, & Saglam, 2005). Equally important, students need to master certain abilities and skills such as visualizing a chemical reaction at the molecular level, reasoning about a macroscopic phenomenon using chemical representations, and coordinating multiple representations (Ben-Zvi, Eylon, & Silberstein, 1987;Gabel & Samuel, 1987;Hesse & Anderson, 1992;Kozma, 2000Kozma, , 2003Krajcik, 1991;Yarroch, 1985).…”

The Integration of Submicroscopic Representations Used in Chemistry Textbook Sets into Curriculum Topics

“…4 To support the quality of the textbook sets in chemistry education, significant attention has been paid to textbook analysis. For example, Abraham et al 5 studied eighth graders' degree of understanding of five selected chemistry concepts found in textbooks and attempted to identify related misconceptions; Sanger and Greenbowe 6 analysed the college chemistry textbooks as sources of misconceptions and errors in electrochemistry; Abd-El-Khalick, Waters, and Le 7 studied representations of nature of science in high school chemistry textbooks over the past four decades; Devetak, Vogrinc, and Glažar 8 studied explanations of states of matter in Slovenian science textbooks from 1th to 8th Grade; and Souza and Porto 9 analysed iconographic and textual aspects of chemistry textbooks which had significant diffusion in the context of Brazilian universities.…”

Estudio del tratamiento del enlace químico en los libros de texto españoles

“…La forma en que la química se presenta en los libros de texto de todo el mundo ha sido estudiada por diversos autores en las últimas décadas (Abraham, Grzybowski, Renner y Marek, 1992;Matus, Benarroch y Nappa, 2011;Matus, Benarroch y Perales, 2008). Calvo y Martín (2005), quienes analizaron el tratamiento dado a la Química en los libros de texto de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) con el objetivo de determinar si se adaptaban adecuadamente al currículo oficial, señalan que no hay gran diferencia en la secuenciación de los contenidos entre editoriales y destacan la frecuencia con que aparecen imprecisiones o inexactitudes o incluso errores químicos, como no incluir los últimos elementos del Sistema Periódico (SP), utilizar la nomenclatura antigua para nombrar los grupos del SP o no diferenciar claramente entre sustancia pura y mezcla, o entre los distintos tipos de mezclas.…”