Arithmetic skills are without a doubt integral to a student's success or failure in first-semester general chemistry. The MUST (Math-Up Skills Test) is a powerful tool for assessing a student's arithmetic logic and therefore serves as a great predictor for at-risk students. Early math reviews at the start of the semester are thought to help…

This paper reports a comparison of a group of higher-and lower-achieving undergraduate chemistry students, 17 in total, as separated on their ability in stoichiometry. This exploratory study of 17 students investigated parallels and differences in the students' general and domain-specific cognitive abilities. Performance, strategies, and mistakes…

Students tend to learn genetics by rote and may not realise the interrelationships in daily life. Because reasoning abilities are necessary to construct relationships between concepts and rote learning impedes the students' sound understanding, it was predicted that having high level of formal reasoning and adopting meaningful learning orientation…

This study is aimed at investigating the relationships among students' relevant prior knowledge, meaningful learning orientation, reasoning ability, self-efficacy, locus of control, attitudes toward biology and achievement with the human circulatory system (HCS) using the learning cycle (LC) and the traditional classroom setting. The study was…

We investigated the effect of instructional analogies in interaction with logical thinking ability on achievement and attitude towards chemistry. The participants were 147 female students from 6 8th grade classes in three public junior high schools selected by using a random multistage sampling method from five education districts in Tabriz, a…

Submicrorepresentations (SMRs) are a powerful tool for identifying misconceptions of chemical concepts and for generating proper mental models of chemical phenomena in students' long-term memory during chemical education. The main purpose of the study was to determine which independent variables (gender, formal reasoning abilities, visualization…

Although students' misconceptions about the concept of chemical equilibrium has been the focus of numerous investigations, few have investigated students' systematic errors when solving equilibrium problems at the college level. Students (n=189) enrolled in the second semester of a first year chemistry course for science and engineering majors at…