Enhancing Students' Conceptual Understanding of Chemistry in a SiMaYang Learning Environment

Abstract

Students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry needs to be supported by the skill to think at three levels of representation. Many students have difficulty understanding chemistry concepts because of it. Chemistry teaching needs to provide a learning environment that involves chemical representations to facilitate students’ interconnection skills of three levels of representation and ultimately improve students’ conceptual understanding. SiMaYang learning was designed by integrating chemical representation during the learning process. This study aimed to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry through the implementation of SiMaYang learning. A descriptive quantitative research method with one group pretest-posttest design was used in this study. Students’ conceptual understanding was measured using three sets of essay tests containing macroscopic, symbolic, and submicroscopic tests for the topic of the buffer concept. The research data were analyzed descriptively and statistically using N-gain and paired sample t-tests. The results of the paired sample t-test showed the sig value. 0.000 <0.05, which means SiMaYang learning affects increasing students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry. The finding of this study informed the students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry increased in the medium category (N-gain = 0.62). SiMaYang learning, which was designed to involve three levels of representation, can increase students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry. Keywords: chemistry, conceptual understanding ,SiMaYang learning environment