Tan, Kim Chwee Daniel

High school students have difficulty in understanding the concepts involved in intermolecular forces. A sound starting point for the teaching and learning of a difficult chemistry topic would be the clarification of the content framework that is required for the topic. Lists of propositional knowledge statements and concept maps should be drawn up to define the content framework for the topic to make explicit the essential concepts of the topic and how these concepts are linked to each other. In this paper, the authors described how the content framework for high school intermolecular forces was developed to facilitate the teaching and learning of intermolecular forces.

Previous research has shown that grade 10 students in Singapore find quaiitative analysis practical work difficult to understand and carry out, and unrelated to the theory they had learned in class. This article describes a teaching package developed explicitly to teach the concepts, processes and thinking skills involved in qualitative analysis.

This cross-age study sought to determine the extent of secondary students’ (14-17 years old), junior college students’ (16 to 19 years old), and graduate trainee-teachers’ conceptions of the reactions involved in the testing of cations and anions in basic secondary qualitative analysis. The results showed that many of the participants in the study had little understanding of the reactions involved, and that alternative conceptions were prevalent among all groups of participants. The authors believe that the lack of understanding of the reactions involved in qualitative analysis is due to the requirements of the present qualitative analysis practical work assessment system which mainly emphasizes students’ observational skills.

Chemical bonding is a topic which many secondary students find difficult to understand. The concepts in chemical bonding are abstract, so there is great potential for the formation of alternative conceptions as students try to derive meaning from what is said by the teacher or what is written in the textbooks. Thus teachers need to be aware of students’ conceptions of chemical bonding in order to develop teaching strategies to enable their own students to construct ideas of chemical bonding which are compatible with the scientific concepts.

A two-tier multiple-choice diagnostic instrument was used to determine 915 grade 10 students' (15- to 17-year-olds) understanding of the acid, base and salt reactions involved in basic qualitative analysis. The results showed that many students did not understand the formation of precipitates and complex salts, acid-salt/base reactions and thermal decomposition involved in qualitative analysis. This indicated that the usual method of teaching the topic might be ineffective in fostering its understanding. In response to this, an instructional package which emphasised the three levels of representation of the reactions was developed.

This paper draws on Foucault to (a) describe the production of classroom discourse in relation to how ordering manifests within the discourse, and (b) to explicate how chemistry classroom discourses are not fixed but are the site of constant contestations of power as displayed in an eighty minute high school lesson on organic chemistry in Singapore. This microanalysis of discourse provides opportunities to reconstruct how teachers teach and dispels the notion that power is uniquely their sovereign possession. Classroom instruction is in fact a complex activity that coordinates power/knowledge production through communication. Examining classroom instruction through Foucaultian lenses uncovers the taken for granted nature of communication and illustrates the capillary relations of power and knowing.

Traditional modes of chemistry education in schools focus on imparting chemistry knowledge to students via instruction. Consequently, students often acquire the mistaken understanding that scientific knowledge comprises a fixed body of “proven” facts. They fail to comprehend that the construction of scientific understanding is a human and social endeavor. Consequently, there can be alternative and conflicting views and theories. To provide students access to an enhanced learning curriculum, Legends of Alkhimia was designed and developed as an educational game for 13 to 14-year-olds to foster the learning of chemistry through inquiry. The multiplayer game supports four concurrent players. It is played on personal computers connected via a local area network. The game embeds students in problem solving challenges related to the use of chemistry in realistic contexts. In attempting to solve these problems, students must engage in individual laboratory work using an in-game virtual chemistry lab. The game levels take students through a narrative arc that provides coherence to the entire gameplay experience. Legends of Alkhimia, together with its associated curricular materials, instantiates classroom learning based on performance pedagogy: a pedagogy that constructs learning through the lens of performance theory. Leveraging the immersive affordances of 3D game environments, the learning experience is designed to engage students in the dialectic interplay between learning in the first person, based on playing the game, and learning in the third person, based on the Bakhtinian notion of dialog. The learning process follows a developmental trajectory of becoming a chemist. Enacting performance pedagogy in the classroom requires a shift in traditional classroom culture toward that of a professional practice community. We report on an empirical study of a game-based learning classroom intervention where students in the Alkhimia learning program participated in an 8-week curriculum sequence involving six levels of game play. We compared pre- and posttest survey responses from a class of 40 students who learned chemistry using the Alkhimia curriculum. We also compared learning outcomes of students in the said intervention class with a control class of 38 students who learned chemistry through traditional classroom instruction. All students in our study were 13-year-olds from a typical government secondary school. We noted significant shifts in intervention students’ perceptions of their identity, their epistemological beliefs, their dispositions toward science inquiry, and of classroom culture. Students’ understanding of chemistry was evaluated through a common assessment that comprised a complex separation task involving mixtures, solutes, and immiscible liquids. Two evaluation criteria were used: (1) effectiveness of separation, and (2) demonstration of conceptual understanding of chemistry. We found that the Alkhimia students significantly outperformed the control students when assessed on the extent to which effective separation was achieved in the students’ proposed solution (t75 = 2.56, p = .026) and when assessed with respect to conceptual understanding of chemistry in the separation task (t75 = 3.41, p = .002). We discuss, from a theoretical perspective, how and why learning with the Alkhimia curriculum is efficacious. Our findings are significant in that they suggest how inquiry learning can be successfully enacted in a chemistry game-based learning curriculum, and they underscore the efficacy of approaching game-based learning in terms of performance.

Particle nature of matter is one of the most challenging models students encounter in secondary science. Numerous studies have written about the learning impediments and the alternative conceptions that students have while learning to understand and apply the particle nature of matter to explain phenomena such as thermal expansion and phase changes. This article illustrates how some common representations used in science texts and lessons can inadvertently constrain understanding of the particle model and offers suggestions on how students can be better supported in understanding these representations.

Web 2.0 technologies can be defined as Web-based services or products that allow individuals to share digital resources with one another, to engage each other in conversation and to collaborate with one another so that they can collectively construct knowledge. This article discusses the potential uses of Web 2.0 technologies, for example RSS feeds, social bookmarking applications, blogs, podcasts, wikis and immersive virtual environments, to facilitate students' learning of science, especially in the 'long tail' region of science education outside the standard science curriculum.