Review of Essentials of Chemical Education

Abstract

Chemiedidaktik Heute was published in Germany in 2001 and Essentials of Chemical Education is a translation, with some updating. My impression is that the amount of revision was not large. Not having read the book in German, I cannot say for sure, but of the several hundred references, less than 10% have dates after 2001. One of the more recent references is Misconceptions in Chemistry, with one of the same authors and the same publisher. A very large fraction of the citations are from sources in German, which greatly decreases their utility to monolingual Americans. It is not difficult to find awkward phraseology and a few typos (the first one I noticed is at the end of the first sentence, on page 1 of the Introduction). Those problems, including the fact that Table 5.1 remains entirely in German, is evidence that the book was not carefully edited, but they do not subtract substantially from its utility.