Students’ chemical literacy: A study in chemical bonding

Abstract

Scientific literacy is the ability to understand science, communicate science, and apply science skills to solve a problem. Scientific literacy skills, especially chemical literacy are things that must be possessed by students in the 21st century. This study aims to analysis students’ chemical literacy abilities in chemical bonding material. The research use quantitative approach by survey method. A total of 199 first year students from four Public High Schools were randomly selected in the school category, they have very good accreditation in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Data were collected by test techniques with Chemical Bonding Literacy Test (CBLT). The instrument consist of chemical literacy ability open-ended questions with three aspects namely the context, chemical knowledge content, and Higher-Order Learning Skills (HOLS) in the form of 21 questions about chemical bond material. The analysis of students’ chemical literacy ability is done by categorizing the scores obtained from the test into the ideal ranking category. The results of this study indicate that students’ chemical literacy ability are still very low as evidenced by the results of the analysis students entered into the bad category. This study suggest that students need to be extra in develop their chemical literacy skills, especially in the aspects of connecting and analyzing scientific information.