Abstract
This paper aims to identify differences in the justification of the selection of 3D dynamic submicroscopic-representation (SMR) of the solid and liquid states of water, as well as the freezing of water presented in selected authentic tasks. According to students' achievements in solving these tasks at different levels of education, their explanations were identified. To explain in greater detail how students attempted to solve the authentic tasks, an eye-tracking method was used to identify the differences in the total fixation durations on specific areas of interest at the specific SMRs between successful and unsuccessful students in three age groups. A total of 79 students participated in this research. The data were collected with a structured interview conducted with students when solving three authentic tasks displayed on the computer screen. The tasks comprise text (as problem and questions), macro-images (photos of the phenomena) and SMRs of the phenomena. The eye-tracker was also used to measure the students' gaze fixations at the particular area of interest. The results show that successful students' justifications for a correct SMR include macroscopic and sub-microscopic representations of the chosen concepts. Along different stages of education, the selection success increases and sufficient justifications comprise the sub-microscopic level. It could be concluded that there are mostly no significant differences between successful and unsuccessful students within the same age group in the total fixation duration at the correct SMR. Further studies are needed to investigate the information-processing strategies between high and low achievers in solving various authentic tasks comprising SMRs and those that integrate all three levels of the representation of chemical concepts.
Highlights
Most chemical concepts are comprehended as abstract for teaching and learning because they can be represented on three different levels of representation: macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic
This paper aims to identify differences in the justification of the selection of 3D dynamic submicroscopic-representation (SMR) of the solid and liquid states of water, as well as the freezing of water presented in selected authentic tasks
The results showed that all students in Groups 2 and 3 chose the correct SMR for the solid and liquid state of water, while one student in Group 1 chose the incorrect SMR for the solid state of water and two of them chose the incorrect SMR for the liquid state of water; 23.33% of the students in Group 1, 58.62% in Group 2, and 75.00% in Group 3 chose the correct 3D dynamic SMR for the freezing of water
Summary
Most chemical concepts are comprehended as abstract for teaching and learning because they can be represented on three different levels of representation: macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic. The teaching and learning of chemical concepts can be facilitated by context-based chemistry approaches that usually start from contexts (topics, questions) that are close to students’ everyday life (authentic context). These approaches increase students’ interest, activate their pre-knowledge on certain topics and offer situations in which newly developed knowledge can be applied and linked to basic concepts.[1] Several authors have taken this into account when designing activities and tasks for students.[2,3,4,5]. For visualisation at the sub-microscopic level, teachers could use static and dynamic 2D or 3D submicro-representations.[8,9] some researchers[10] have reported that students using 3D dynamic representations constructed a better understanding of the chemical concepts than students using static 3D representations did, while other researchers[11] have reported that 3D representations help students improve incomplete understandings of the concepts and influence the construction of more complete concepts
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