Integrating Nanoscience Activities in Enhancing Malaysian Secondary School Students’ Understanding of Chemistry Concepts

Kah-Heng Chua,Mageswary Karpudewan

doi:10.29333/ejmste/110781

Abstract

This study reports the effectiveness of nanoscience activities in enhancing secondary school students’ understanding of two chemistry concepts: structure of atom and acid and bases. For the purpose of this study, quasi experiment was employed to 163 Grade 10 students from the Northern Region of Malaysia. Sample from the experimental group was exposed to a series of nanoscience activities lasted for 10 weeks. Students’ understanding on the two chemistry concepts was tested using Chemistry Achievement Test (CAT). The CAT consists of multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions. Data obtained from CAT was analysed using one-way ANCOVA to identify the effectiveness of nanoscience activity in enhancing students’ understanding of chemistry concepts. The findings show that there were statistically significant differences between experimental and control groups’ mean scores (F (1,160) = 167.82, p < 0.05 ηp2 = 0.512) with the experimental group students reporting higher mean. The ANCOVA result indicated experimental group students’ understanding of chemistry concepts significantly higher than the comparison group. The qualitative analysis of open-ended responses further supports findings obtained from the quantitative analysis. The study suggests that integrating nanoscience into the contemporary teaching of chemistry is relevant and appropriate.

Highlights

Chemistry, by nature, is a highly conceptual subject
Luxford, and Brandriet (2015) reflected that students had attained the understanding of the concepts if they were able to perform any one of the five fragments: (1) transfer: student able to apply core chemistry ideas to chemistry situations that are novel to them, (2) depth: student able to reason about core chemistry ideas using skills that go beyond rote memorization or algorithmic problem solving, (3) predict: student able to expand situational knowledge to predict and/or explain behaviour of chemical system, (4) problem solving: student able to demonstrate the critical thinking and reasoning involved in solving problems including laboratory measurement, and (5) translate: student able to translate across scales and representations
According to Cohen (1988), values between 0.5 to 0.8 is considered to be medium to large effect size. This signifies that nanoscience activities have added value in improving secondary school students’ understanding of chemistry concepts

Summary

Introduction

By nature, is a highly conceptual subject. Students’ understanding of chemistry concepts is an important area of research in chemistry education (Ben-Zvi, Eylon, & Silberstein, 1988; Gabel, 1988). Chemistry concepts such as the structure of the atom, state of matter, salts, acids and bases are some fundamental concepts students required to master to facilitate the understanding more advance chemistry concepts at higher level of learning (Kirbulut & Beeth, 2013; Levy Nahum, Mamlok-Naaman, Hofstein, & Taber, 2010; McWeeny, 2007). Meyer (2005) claimed that introducing and emphasizing the particulate nature of matter (sub-microscopic level) during the chemistry class helped the students to link the particulate nature of matter to another level (macroscopic level and symbolic level). Such a phenomenon is rarely practiced in chemistry classes in school (Gabel, 1993). Understanding of single concept such as diffusion into more complex concepts such as the movement of particles based on kinetic theory of matter was built coherently based on few underlying concepts

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion