In-service high school chemistry teachers' view towards chemistry: Is it a difficult subject?

Abstract

In-service chemistry teachers' perceptions toward chemistry were important because their perceptions implied on the quality level of chemistry learning they would perform. This research focused to explore in-service high school chemistry teachers' view towards the difficulties in chemistry subject. To meet this purpose, a survey research with qualitative approach was implemented in this study. The participants include a total of 15 high school in-service chemistry teachers in Gunungkidul regency, Indonesia through saturated sampling. The Questionnaire of Teachers' View towards Chemistry (QTVC) that covers of six open-ended questions about in-service chemistry teachers' difficulties toward chemistry subject, the factors that make chemistry difficult to learn by students based on in-service chemistry teachers' view, and the difficulties of in-service chemistry teachers in teaching chemistry subject were used as the data collection tools. The data were analysed using content analysis of question-by-question with the combination of inductive and interpretative coding. The content analysis was performed on QTVC with each question has different number of categories. The findings on each question were presented with the number of frequencies and percentages on every category. The results of this research highlighted that most of in-service high school chemistry teachers feel that the molecular geometry, thermochemistry, and balancing redox reaction were the most difficult high school chemistry topic on grade X, XI, and XII respectively. While based on the participants' experience, the top three high school chemistry topics that most students found to be difficult to learn were the chemical calculation, balancing redox equation, and chemical equilibrium topics. Moreover, the chemical calculation and molecular geometry topic were the two high school chemistry topics that belong to the most difficult to teach. Several interested findings regarding the caused that makes chemistry to be difficult subject and efforts to overcome the difficulties were discussed in this paper.