The diversity of scientific methods has received increasing attention in the field of science education. This paper aimed to investigate how preservice chemistry teachers perceive scientific methods and their diversity. Based on the theoretical framework of Brandon's Matrix and previous research, two tasks (i.e., Task 1 "understanding of the…

Safety skills are recognized as essential lab skills for students, necessitating the incorporation of active learning of chemical safety education into undergraduate curricula. Meaningful engagement of students in training and education on principle-based lab safety skills, chemical information sources, and general safety instructions is crucial…

General Chemistry serves virtually all STEM students. It has been accused of covering content in a "mile wide and inch deep" fashion. This has made it very difficult to assess, where chemistry educators have relied on assessments of specific topics. Assessing across all these different topics requires introducing many different chemical…

Instrumentation plays a vital role in almost every area of chemistry. As such, it is imperative that the undergraduate curriculum is designed to allow students to have opportunities to use a variety of instruments to best prepare them for careers in chemistry. Previous work has provided evidence of the types of instruments students use in…

Authentic assessment is often narrowly framed as tasks that mirror workplace tasks, resulting in on overemphasis on generic workplace skills at the expense of disciplinary knowledge. We place disciplinary knowledge at the heart of authentic assessment and explore how authentic assessment across a programme can contribute to an authentic view of…

This work aims to evaluate the evolution of chemical bonding concepts of high school students at public schools in southern Brazil. For this, we built the epistemological profile of each student who took part in a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) about this topic, based on the foundations of Bachelard's theory. Following the principles of the…

Citizen science is an expanding field in public education and learning and can bridge the gap between science and society. This benefits not only just citizen learning and scientific research, but also earlier learning in formal science education. Citizen science can foster an understanding of engagement with science as well as the perception of…

Using Bruno Latour's framework of a "collective of humans and nonhumans", this paper presents an analysis of chemistry instruction in a high school curriculum and professional development setting to present the chemistry education community with a new way to think about reality and knowledge construction and, at the same time, to…

In a normal year approximately 3 months pass between students taking their final examinations in high school or college and beginning an undergraduate course in chemistry. In the months prior to those examinations, students will usually have undertaken an extensive period of revision and consolidation of the key concepts learned throughout their…

In this reply to Elon Langbeheim's response to an article recently published in this journal, authors Smith and Villarreal identify several types of general chemistry students' misconceptions concerning the concept of particle position during physical change. They focus their response on one of the misconceptions identified as such: Given a solid…

This article discusses the nature of implicit knowledge, something which is considered to be highly influential in learning. The notion of implicit knowledge is important in conceptualising studies exploring student thinking and learning in chemistry, and in considering how the results of such studies should be interpreted to inform teaching.…

Introductory chemistry has long been considered a service course by various departments that entrust chemistry departments with teaching their students. As a result, most introductory courses include a majority of students who are not chemistry majors, and many are health and science related majors who are required to take chemistry. To identify…

The article, "Using Animations in Identifying General Chemistry Students' Misconceptions and Evaluating Their Knowledge Transfer Relating to Particle Position in Physical Changes" (Smith and Villarreal, 2015), reports that a substantial proportion of undergraduate students expressed misconceived ideas regarding the motion of particles in…

Student performance in general organic chemistry courses is determined by a wide range of factors including cognitive ability, motivation and cultural capital. Previous work on cognitive factors has tended to focus on specific areas rather than exploring performance across all problem types and cognitive skills. In this study, we have categorized…

Qualifications are commonly seen as one of the core instruments for governing and regulating the labour market. Linked to access to occupations and professions, qualifications define what a person needs to know and be able to do to carry out a certain activity on the labour market. Various factors, from health and safety to consumer protection and…