Chemical Education Towards Research Based Practice

Chemical education is essential to everybody because it deals with ideas that play major roles in personal, social, and economic decisions. This book is based on three principles: that all aspects of chemical education should be associated with research; that the development of opportunities for chemical education should be both a continuous process and be linked to research; and that the professional development of all those associated with chemical education should make extensive and diverse use of that research. It is intended for: pre-service and practising chemistry teachers and lecturers; chemistry teacher educators; chemical education researchers; the designers and managers of formal chemical curricula; informal chemical educators; authors of textbooks and curriculum support materials; practising chemists and chemical technologists. It addresses: the relation between chemistry and chemical education; curricula for chemical education; teaching and learning about chemical compounds and chemical change; the development of teachers; the development of chemical education as a field of enquiry. This is mainly done in respect of the full range of formal education contexts (schools, universities, vocational colleges) but also in respect of informal education contexts (books, science centres and museums).

This book is aimed at chemistry teachers, teacher educators, chemistry education researchers, and all those who are interested in increasing the relevance of chemistry teaching and learning as well as students' perception of it. The book consists of 20 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a certain issue related to the relevance of chemistry education. These chapters are based on a recently suggested model of the relevance of science education, encompassing individual, societal, and vocational relevance, its present and future implications, as well as its intrinsic and extrinsic aspects. “Two highly distinguished chemical educators, Ingo Eilks and AviHofstein, have brought together 40 internationally renowned colleagues from 16 countries to offer an authoritative view of chemistry teaching today. Between them, the authors, in 20 chapters, give an exceptional description of the current state of chemical education and signpost the future in both research and in the classroom. There is special emphasis on the many attempts to enthuse students with an understanding of the central science, chemistry, which will be helped by having an appreciation of the role of the science in today’s world. Themes which transcend all education such as collaborative work, communication skills, attitudes, inquiry learning and teaching, and problem solving are covered in detail and used in the context of teaching modern chemistry. The book is divided into four parts which describe the individual, the societal, the vocational and economic, and the non-formal dimensions and the editors bring all the disparate leads into a coherent narrative, that will be highly satisfying to experienced and new researchers and to teachers with the daunting task of teaching such an intellectually demanding subject. Just a brief glance at the index and the references will convince anyone interested in chemical education that this book is well worth studying; it is scholarly and readable and has tackled the most important issues in chemical education today and in the foreseeable future.” – Professor David Waddington, Emeritus Professor in Chemistry Education, University of York, United Kingdom

Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Award This comprehensive collection of top-level contributions provides a thorough review of the vibrant field of chemistry education. Highly-experienced chemistry professors and education experts cover the latest developments in chemistry learning and teaching, as well as the pivotal role of chemistry for shaping a more sustainable future. Adopting a practice-oriented approach, the current challenges and opportunities posed by chemistry education are critically discussed, highlighting the pitfalls that can occur in teaching chemistry and how to circumvent them. The main topics discussed include best practices, project-based education, blended learning and the role of technology, including e-learning, and science visualization. Hands-on recommendations on how to optimally implement innovative strategies of teaching chemistry at university and high-school levels make this book an essential resource for anybody interested in either teaching or learning chemistry more effectively, from experience chemistry professors to secondary school teachers, from educators with no formal training in didactics to frustrated chemistry students.

Scientists use arguments to relate the evidence that they select from their investigations and to justify the claims that they make about their observations. This book brings together leading researchers to draw attention to research, policy and practice around the inclusion of argumentation in chemistry education.

Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Award This comprehensive collection of top-level contributions provides a thorough review of the vibrant field of chemistry education. Highly-experienced chemistry professors and education experts cover the latest developments in chemistry learning and teaching, as well as the pivotal role of chemistry for shaping a more sustainable future. Adopting a practice-oriented approach, the current challenges and opportunities posed by chemistry education are critically discussed, highlighting the pitfalls that can occur in teaching chemistry and how to circumvent them. The main topics discussed include best practices, project-based education, blended learning and the role of technology, including e-learning, and science visualization. Hands-on recommendations on how to optimally implement innovative strategies of teaching chemistry at university and high-school levels make this book an essential resource for anybody interested in either teaching or learning chemistry more effectively, from experience chemistry professors to secondary school teachers, from educators with no formal training in didactics to frustrated chemistry students.

This book focuses on developing and updating prospective and practicing chemistry teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. The 11 chapters of the book discuss the most essential theories from general and science education, and in the second part of each of the chapters apply the theory to examples from the chemistry classroom. Key sentences, tasks for self-assessment, and suggestions for further reading are also included. The book is focused on many different issues a teacher of chemistry is concerned with. The chapters provide contemporary discussions of the chemistry curriculum, objectives and assessment, motivation, learning difficulties, linguistic issues, practical work, student active pedagogies, ICT, informal learning, continuous professional development, and teaching chemistry in developing environments. This book, with contributions from many of the world’s top experts in chemistry education, is a major publication offering something that has not previously been available. Within this single volume, chemistry teachers, teacher educators, and prospective teachers will find information and advice relating to key issues in teaching (such as the curriculum, assessment and so forth), but contextualised in terms of the specifics of teaching and learning of chemistry, and drawing upon the extensive research in the field. Moreover, the book is written in a scholarly style with extensive citations to the literature, thus providing an excellent starting point for teachers and research students undertaking scholarly studies in chemistry education; whilst, at the same time, offering insight and practical advice to support the planning of effective chemistry teaching. This book should be considered essential reading for those preparing for chemistry teaching, and will be an important addition to the libraries of all concerned with chemical education. Dr Keith S. Taber (University of Cambridge; Editor: Chemistry Education Research and Practice) The highly regarded collection of authors in this book fills a critical void by providing an essential resource for teachers of chemistry to enhance pedagogical content knowledge for teaching modern chemistry. Through clever orchestration of examples and theory, and with carefully framed guiding questions, the book equips teachers to act on the relevance of essential chemistry knowledge to navigate such challenges as context, motivation to learn, thinking, activity, language, assessment, and maintaining professional expertise. If you are a secondary or post-secondary teacher of chemistry, this book will quickly become a favorite well-thumbed resource! Professor Hannah Sevian (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Chemistry seeks to provide qualitative and quantitative explanations for the observed behaviour of elements and their compounds. Doing so involves making use of three types of representation: the macro (the empirical properties of substances); the sub-micro (the natures of the entities giving rise to those properties); and the symbolic (the number of entities involved in any changes that take place). Although understanding this triplet relationship is a key aspect of chemical education, there is considerable evidence that students find great difficulty in achieving mastery of the ideas involved. In bringing together the work of leading chemistry educators who are researching the triplet relationship at the secondary and university levels, the book discusses the learning involved, the problems that students encounter, and successful approaches to teaching. Based on the reported research, the editors argue for a coherent model for understanding the triplet relationship in chemical education.

The purpose of this book is to address the key elements of planning chemical education research projects and educational outreach/evaluation components of science grants from a pragmatic point of view.

Focusing on the teaching and learning of science concepts at the elementary and high school levels, this volume bridges the gap between state-of-the-art research and classroom practice in science education. The contributors -- science educators, cognitive scientists, and psychologists -- draw clear connections between theory, research, and instructional application, with the ultimate goal of improving science teachers' effectiveness in the classroom. Toward this end, explicit models, illustrations, and examples drawn from actual science classes are included.

This edited volume of papers from the twenty first International Conference on Chemical Education attests to our rapidly changing understanding of the chemistry itself as well as to the potentially enormous material changes in how it might be taught in the future. Covering the full range of appropriate topics, the book features work exploring themes as various as e-learning and innovations in instruction, and micro-scale lab chemistry. In sum, the 29 articles published in these pages focus the reader’s attention on ways to raise the quality of chemistry teaching and learning, promoting the public understanding of chemistry, deploying innovative technology in pedagogy practice and research, and the value of chemistry as a tool for highlighting sustainability issues in the global community. Thus the ambitious dual aim achieved in these pages is on the one hand to foster improvements in the leaching and communication of chemistry—whether to students or the public, and secondly to promote advances in our broader understanding of the subject that will have positive knock-on effects on the world’s citizens and environment. In doing so, the book addresses (as did the conference) the neglect suffered in the chemistry classroom by issues connected to globalization, even as it outlines ways to bring the subject alive in the classroom through the use of innovative technologies.