Bridging the gap between macro and micro: enhancing students' chemical reasoning: how to use demonstration experiments effectively for the teaching and learning of structure-property reasoning
Abstract
The aim of this research was to develop an effective, generative, and practical approach to enhance students’ structure-property reasoning (SPR). The approach consists of an evaluation instrument that assesses the level of structure-property reasoning and a teaching practice to make structure-property reasoning more explicit for students.
As base of the approach, the perspective for SPR was used as model for structure-property reasoning. With this model, we aimed to represent the relationship between chemical concepts and the skill of structure-property reasoning.
The SPR-instrument combines a sorting task with a mapping task based on the perspective for SPR. The instrument was tested on secondary school students and first-year chemistry students. The results showed that the SPR-instrument can discriminate between these two groups.
This teaching practice consists of demonstration experiments with two design principles, namely the Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) approach and the perspective for SPR. The teaching practice was tested on Y-4 pre-university students. The results showed that the teaching practice contributed to the development of structure-property reasoning. The practicality of (re)designed demonstrations appeared to be as high as that of "traditional" demonstrations. The research showed that perspective for SPR (combined or not with POE-demonstrations) could bridge the gap in students’ chemical reasoning.
