LEARNING NOTES

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(CHAPTER 1-3)

By: CINDIRELLA A. GALOS

SCI 505 - STRATEGIES AND EVALUATION TECHNIQUES IN
SCIENCE
PART I: CHEMISTRY EDUCATION: A GLOBAL ENDEAVOUR

Table of Contents

Chapter Page
1. Chemistry Education and Human Activity................................................................1
2. Chemistry Education That Makes Connections:
Our Responsibilities.................................................................................................8
3. The Connection between the Local Chemistry
Curriculum and Chemistry Terms in the Global
News: The Glocalization Perspective...........................................................................11
 Chapter 1
Chemistry Education and Human Activity

● The difference between historical “chemical education” and contemporary

“chemistry education” is human activity.

How should the modern profession of chemistry education differ from historic
chemical education?
Chemical Education Chemistry Education
Conveys that at the heart of this domain It is more authentic descriptor than
of education are substances: their chemical education which is a good
structures and properties, and the starting point in emphasizing to students
reactions that change them into other and the public the centrality of human
substances. activity in our professional domain.

● Beyond chemicals, human activity is central to:

1. Teaching and learning chemistry
2. The practice of chemistry in laboratories and industry
3. The use and reactions of chemical substances by ordinary people

Chemistry educators should embed an understanding of all three of the

different types of human activity into their practices of teaching and learning
about the structures , properties and reactions of chemical substances.

A Visual Metaphor : Tetrahedral Chemistry Education

● Tetrahedral chemistry education is reviewed as a visual and conceptual metaphor
that was created to emphasize the need to situate chemical concepts, symbolic
representations and chemical substances and reactions in human contexts.

How does tetrahedral shape relate to the move from chemical to chemistry education?
Ø Chemistry educators have shown that students need to encounter chemistry at
different thinking levels to obtain a rich understanding of chemical substances and
reactions. To address human learning patterns, there are three widely accepted
thinking levels needed to learn chemistry and these are often presented as a triangle
of thinking levels required for mastery of chemistry :

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1. The symbolic or representational (symbols, equations, calculations)
2. The macroscopic (tangible, visible, laboratory)
3. Molecular or submicroscopic

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 The visual metaphor of tetrahedral chemistry education extends the triangle
of levels of engaging chemistry into a third dimension, in which the fourth
vertex represents the human contexts for chemistry.

Three Emphases on Human Activity in Chemistry Education

Three dimensions of human activity that should receive strong emphases in our
professional efforts to ensure that our practice meets the learning needs of chemistry
students:
1. The human activity of learning and teaching chemistry
2. The human activity of carrying out chemistry
3. The human activity that has imprinted itself in such a substantial way on the
chemistry of our planet that it has defined a new geological epoch

I. The Human Activity of Learning and Teaching Chemistry

● Johnstone discussess some of the results of focusing too much attention to the
chemical and not enough to the education part of chemical education.
● As a result, chemical education has become unimportant, uninteresting, and
indigestible, resulting in student characteristics ranging from inability to indifference
about achieving comprehension.
● Gilber’s review of the interrelated problems facing chemical education over the past
two decades reinforces Johnston’s critique, suggesting that students experience:
1. An overload of content

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2. Numerous isolated facts that make it difficult for students to give meaning to what
they learn
3. Lack of ability to transfer conceptual learning to address problems presented in
different ways
4. Lack of relevance of knowledge to everyday life
5. Too much emphasis on preparation for further study in chemistry rather than for
development of scientific literacy
● Tetrahedral chemistry education implies identifying and meeting the needs of the
diverse groups of students that serve with chemistry courses, and a transition from an
emphasis on teaching to what research has to say about effective strategies and
approaches to help students learn, and to learn chemistry.

Example of the atoms-first approach that relates to the Human Activity of

Learning ad Teaching Chemistry :
What should be done first, atoms or learner?
● The atoms-first approach provides a consistent and logical method for teaching
general chemistry who is an expert in chemistry. But to a novice learner, his approach
easily leads to fragmented understanding and difficulty in seeing the relevance of the
knowledge learned.
● Perhaps atoms and other isolated chemical building blocks need to come second,
after first motivating learners with the beauty and importance of the whole, based on
an understanding of their diverse needs for learning chemistry.
● Effective educational practice requires understanding who are the students to take
chemistry, and ensuring that learning objectives are formulated to meet the needs of
the many students.

Effective Practices in the Human Activity of Learning and Teaching Chemistry

● The educational community has made significant progress in emphasizing the
educational aspect of chemical education. There is now substantial literature
supporting effective practices on the human activity of learning and teaching
chemistry.
● A review of that literature suggests helpful practices to enrich experiences of
learning chemistry:

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1. Understanding the student’s prior conceptual understanding and developing
validated inventories and strategies to identify and address misconceptions
2. Using models for learning that account for different learning styles and limits to
cognitive load
3. Motivating students
4. Engaging students with active and collaborative instruction and building and
supporting intentional learning communities
5. Developing curriculum that connects to the lived experience of students and
societal needs
6. Implementing strategies for faculty professional development
7. Integrating into education the responsible and ethical practice of science
● Visualizing the Chemistry of Climate Change (VC3) is one example of an
evidence-based approach to implementing reform for introductory university courses,
based on an analysis of the motivational and learning needs.

II. The Human Activity of Carrying Out Chemistry

● A second way of for chemistry educators to emphasize the human element is by
attending to the scholarship that asks whether the chemistry taught and learned in
classroom authentically reflects the practice of chemistry.
● Talanquer suggests that the unique features of chemistry as a discipline add
complexity to the efforts to categorize the authencity of portrayals of how chemistry
is carried out.
● Chemistry is about creating new substances, designing new synthetic and
analytical processes, and analyzing and transforming material systems.
● Deep understanding of science, including chemistry, requires understanding the
evidence for theories and the discipline’s underlying assumptions and methods.
● Tetrahedral chemistry education emphasizes the coherence between the rich
human activity by carrying out chemistry and the portrayals of that activity in
classrooms and laboratories.
● Chemistry students should have an authentic understanding of where ideas and
theories come from, how they develop over time, and how they connect to
observations about the world.

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● Some textbooks still present the naive and distorted caricature of a single
hypothetico-deductive method used to carry out chemistry, often referred to as the
scientific method.
Ø Scientific method - principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of
knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of
data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of
hypotheses.
● More authentic portrayals of how chemistry is carried out will leave students with
an understanding that science grows through communities of practice that stand on the
shoulders of prior understanding that are influenced by a wide variety of human
influences, including societal pressures and the availability of research funding.

Breathing the Life of Imagination into Chemistry’s Facts

● Coulson goes on to articulate the importance of recognizing the human imagination
as an integral part of chemistry sense-making.
Ø As Mendeleev said, the facts are there and are being steadily accumulated
day by day. Chemistry certainly includes all the chemical information and
classification with which most school test-books are cluttered up.
Ø But it is more; for, because we are human, we are not satisfied with the
facts alone; and so there is added to our science the sustained effort to
correlate them and breathe into them the life of imagination.

Exemplars: Emphasizing the Human Activity of Carrying out Chemistry

● McNeil uses an innovative pedagogical strategy for moving university students
from algorithmic application of rules for structure and bonding to deeper conceptual
understanding that emphasizes the strength and limitations of complementary models
to explain a large set of experimental observations.
Ø Problem solving, communication and higher order skills are demonstrated as
the groups of students attain deeper conceptual understanding, and the strength and
limitations of models to explain evidence.
● Students are introduced to chemistry through the stories of David Dolphin, a
Canadian chemist and Gavin Flematti, an Australian chemist. Through these human
activity stories, modern techniques like spectroscopy and chromatography, and

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students get a sense of the time scale required in chemical discoveries, as well as the
importance of prior knowledge and serendipity.

III. The Human Activity that has imprinted itself in such a substantial way on
the chemistry of our planet that it has defined a new geological epoch.
Chemistry Education in the Anthropocene Epoch
● Tetrahedral chemistry education implies that students and teachers see how
chemistry affects virtually every aspect of modern life - usually, but not always, for
the better; that human activity is fundamentally altering our planetary boundaries; and
that knowledge of chemistry is crucial in developing strategies to tackle global
sustainability challenges.
Planetary Boundaries: A Chemistry Course Outline
● Beginning in 2009, a series of important academic publications set out to establish
and quantify the boundaries of our planet that should not be crossed if humans are to
avoid unacceptably rapid global environmental change caused by humans. Climate
change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, global freshwater use, and
other issues are among the boundaries.
● To handle this massive transition, we must alter our perceptions of ourselves and
our role in the world. Students are still taught in school that we are living in the
Holocene epoch/era, which began around 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Age.
● But teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene, could be of great help.
It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the
opportunities they offer for shaping the future.
● A starting point in highlighting the intellect and creativity of chemists, and probing
the opportunities chemistry offers for helping to the shape the future, would be to
correlate fundamental concepts in chemistry curriculum with those planetary
boundaries where human activity is substantially impacting earth system processes.

List of Exemplars: Anthropocene - Aware Chemistry Education

● National chemical societies have created programs and committees to raise the
profile of chemistry education initiatives that address the human imprint on our
planet.

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● The ACS Chemistry in Context textbook for teaching chemistry to university
students majoring in disciplines other than science has taught chemistry trough real-
world examples that engage students on multiple levels: their individual health and
well-being, the health prior of their local communities, and the health of wider
ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

 Diving into an Ocean of Concepts Related to Acid-Base Chemistry

Approaches of the three dimensions of human activity:
1. The human activity of learning and teaching chemistry
- Materials are developed after consideration of student conceptions and
documented student misconceptions to achieve both lower and higher order learning
objectives.
2. The human activity of carrying out chemistry
- The nature of scientific evidence as well as the application of conceptual and
mathematical models to analyze data and explain observations is demonstrated, and
the students are introduced to complexity in a contemporary scientific global
challenge.
3. The human activity that has imprinted itself in such a substantial way on the
chemistry of our planet that it has defined a new geological epoch.
- Chemistry students learn about ocean acidification, one of the planetary
boundaries where human-induced global environmental change is becoming
increasingly evident on a relatively short time scale.

From Chemical to Chemistry Education - Barriers to Change

● Educational change from chemical toward more tetrahedrally shaped chemistry
education pre-requires both a vision for identifying and meeting the learning needs of
students in diverse cultural and educational settings, and a critical mass of
professional educators willing to step back from historical practices to examine
evidence for what works and what doesn’t in current practice.
● Effective teaching of chemistry does not develop in the abstract. It must be based on
the discipline of chemistry as well as the numerous interfaces where chemistry is
practiced.

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 Chapter 2
Chemistry Education That Makes Connections: Our Responsibilities
● Chemistry is a physical science, sometimes called central science, that studies
matter. But in the best sense of the word, chemistry is a story, one that connects us to
the fascinating world atoms and molecules as well as to the larger world in which we
live.
The table below tells stories aimed at helping college chemistry instructors better
connect the dots as they teach
Story Stories that connects Story contents showing important connections and
# Chemistry into teaching responsibilities in teaching chemistry
1 Does This Plane Have Wings? - Connections are what transform the way we think.
- Not being able to see certain things in our daily
surroundings leaves us unable to make connections.
2 Coaching Students to “See” Clearly, our students cannot learn chemistry without
Invisible powers of imagination: in essence, the ability to see the
invisible. As a result, models, representations and
visualizations are used by chemistry instructors at all levels,
with some quite elegant ones now available for wider
audiences.
3 Designing Super-Learning - Travis was suggesting that students employs powers of the
Environments for our Students mind to see water molecules, branched hydrocarbons, and
the DNA molecule in the submicroscopic world.
- Similarly, in the macroscopic world they could employ
superpowers and to “see” the hidden connections among air
water, food and energy.
- Framing learning goals as superpowers might be viewed
simply as a curiosity, perhaps an amusing way to liven up
an otherwise boring list of what students should know and
be able to do. Power is accompanied by a responsibility to
use that power wisely.
4 Connections to Public Health - Matthew Fisher Footnote first taught a course on science
( Matthew Fisher) and global sustainability for non-science majors.
- SENCER courses use the power of a good story to
engage students in learning. Fisher represents the SENCER

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 through teaching the real world issues where the starting
points for students - all non-science majors - to learn basic
principles in chemistry, biology and earth science.
- Fisher restructured a two-semester upper-level
biochemistry so that each section of the course was set in
the context of a public health issue.
- Changing the course structure in this way to incorporate
real-world connections and the stories and concerns of
many individuals resulted in a significant shift in affective
engagement on the part of students.
- If our non-majors can benefit by having connections to
“the good stuff,” surely our majors can as well. Teachers
have the responsibility to engage all of our students in
learning topics of interest both now and in their future
professions.
5 Green Chemistry Connections - Up-cycling to their undergraduate students
(Richard Sheardy) - Redesigned their organic chemistry laboratory
experiments in order to minimize contaminants or toxins
produced as waste or by-products
- To make the dream of sustainable green chemistry a
reality in its teaching and training of undergraduates
- Concepts of green chemistry were introduced in their
organic chemistry laboratory.
- Emphasize the importance of using sustainable practices
to their students
- Impact: encourage students to be involved in green
chemistry
6 Connections to Cardboard - a pulp in Misssoula produced lineboard, using a chemical
(Garon Smith) procedure based on sulfuric chemistry
- Smith used the pulp mill as an example of connections
between chemistry and daily life
- Smith as a chemist, “to catalyze change in chemistry
education, making it relevant, interesting, and digestible
- responsibility includes going out into the community as

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7 Wisdom from the Bike Trail
well as returning to bring the story back into the classroom.
- story of a bicycle commuter
- impossible to pay attention at once
- Just like us when we are busy in our day-to-day teaching
activities, it is not possible to pay attention to everything.
The same with our students. As we narrow our focus to one
regard, we miss things that threaten us.
- Our lives and well-being ultimately depend on our ability
to see the bigger picture.

Teacher’s responsibilities to connect the dots and embrace what they teach:
● Responsibilities to get our heads up.
● Responsibilities to our current students, to send them forth from our classrooms
with curiosity and intellectual habits of mind
● Responsibilities to the future citizens that our students will become
● Responsibilities to the future professionals that our students will become
● Responsibilities to the future parents and grandparents that our students will
become
● Responsibilities to those who we will never meet but surely will follow us.

Chapter 3
The Connection between the Local Chemistry Curriculum
and Chemistry Terms in the Global News: The Glocalization

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 Perspective

Understanding Scientific Literacy

● What is Scientific Literacy?
- the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of
science, as a reflective citizen
- is the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes
required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and
economic productivity.
- expands and deepens over a lifetime, not just during the school years.
- means that a person can ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived
from curiosity about everyday experiences
- a scientifically literate citizen is able to evaluate the quality of scientific
information on the basis of its source and the methods used to generate it.
- According to Shamos, scientific literacy includes the following elements:
ü having an awareness of how the science/technology enterprise works
ü having the public feel comfortable with knowing what science is about
ü having the public understand what can be expected from science, and
ü knowing how public opinion can best be heard in respect to the enterprise
ü should also include media literacy, which allows future citizens to be able to
critically follow reports and discussions on science in the media.
● Civic scientific literacy
- is conceptualized as the level of understanding of science and technology
needed to function as citizens in a modern industrial society. He identified three
dimensions for measuring civic scientific literacy. Three dimensions require a citizen
to display the following:
1) An understanding of basic scientific concepts and constructs, such as the
molecule, DNA, and the structure of the solar system;
2) An understanding of the nature and process of scientific inquiry; and
3) A pattern of regular information consumption.
● Scientific Literacy is important in school teaching
- promotes students competencies in the science domain terms of cognitive
understanding of science contents, practical skills, reasoning of scientific phenomena,
and attitude toward science has become essential in school science.

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 - extended impact of scientific literacy, civic-minded citizens should have
scientific literacy with the understanding of scientific terms should be able to read
daily newspapers and generate competing arguments for the given issue (Miller)
- newspapers have the capacity to draw attention to important issues and
concepts in science, but they do not consider these topics in depth nor do they
consider it their job to empower or educate citizens. (Shen)
- describe how selected keywords from chemistry were depicted in local daily
newspapers and textbooks to compared to how these same keywords were used in two
well-known international newspapers to show the frequency trends of selected
keywords and globally across 5 years. Therefore, we have adopted the term
“glocalization” to express the importance of linking local and global issues in science
learning.

Teaching Keywords-Based Recommendation System

- searches for selected keywords in the national and international newspapers,
curriculum standards and textbooks
- subsystem results in a comprehensive literacy-based keyword in search and
analysis system for news media, curriculum standards, and textbooks
- TRKS allows users to link the same concepts among different sources of
data, such as newspapers, curriculum guidelines, and contents of textbooks, in intra
and interdisciplinary curricula.

Method in using Teaching Keywords-Based Recommendation System (TKRS)

- The use of TKRS is in selecting specific terms to investigate the frequencies
of their use in newspapers in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
- The specific terms were global warming, sustainability, energy, acid were
drawn from daily life due to social scientific events and concerns and daily life
experiences.
- While the other three terms: atomic structure, equilibrium and ethylene were
drawn from chemistry textbooks and were commonly covered in the secondary school
chemistry curriculum.
- Let’s say for the example the term Chemical Equilibrium. Chemical
equilibrium is a central concept in chemistry and has received a lot of attention from
teachers as well as students. According to the analysis, this term was rarely mentioned

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in newspapers (close to zero for The China Times and The Liberty Times). Compared
to the other terms that was discussed, on average this term appeared even less often
than the keyword atomic structure.
- Chemical equilibrium was identified in science and technology textbooks for
grades 8, 11, and 12, according to the researchers. Out of 41 textbooks, there were 26
appearances of chemical equilibrium in only four textbooks.
- In other words, chemical equilibrium was not commonly used in daily life
but plays important roles in learning advanced concepts in chemistry (e.g., chemical
reaction), which have to be taught in school science practice.

Implications in Chemistry Education

● Keywords Analysis as Connections between Scientific and Media Literacy
1. There is an emerging need to construct a curriculum map system for
cultivating civic literacy in chemistry.
2. The dynamic progression of introducing appropriate and popular concepts
to laypersons should be well conveyed to media, so that appropriate
concepts can be introduced.
● Keywords Analysis as Guidelines for Curriculum Design
1. The integration of frequencies of keywords in textbooks and daily-life
reports (including newspapers) should be emphasized when a society intends to elicit
civic understanding of science.
2. From the analysis of the selected terms over the past 5 years in this study,
we were able to identify (i) whether or the frequencies of specific terms changed
because of a specific event or (ii) whether central concepts designed for school
teaching should be learned as necessary knowledge and competence in life.
3. On the basis of the design of TKRS, it is possible to find keywords across
as well as within subjects and then identify the contextualized link with the terms in
the textbooks.
● Keywords Analysis as a Source for Linking School Science and Daily Life
1. Media have influenced the public’s understanding of science. Media
reporters have to realize the responsibility and authority they hold and have to convey
the idea of socio-scientific issues carefully.
2. A concept with high frequency implies that the topic is important for the
public to understand.

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 3. As far as we found, the contents of the newspapers were easy to access for
analysis via the Internet. Therefore, we have to make good use of this resource
● Keywords Analysis Informing the Need for Developing Instruments for Measuring
Public Understanding of Science
1. TKRS allows users to find the relationships between specific terms that occur
frequently in media reports as opposed to textbooks.
2. In other words, if a term was commonly mentioned in media reports, then
it should be considered for inclusion in school science
● Civic Scientific Literacy Should Plant Its Seeds in Precollegiate Education and
Then Extend and Enhance Its Impact on General Education in University for Both
Science Majors and Non-science Majors
1. Advocate developing an usable and functional scientific literacy precollegiate
education that allows most students to become well-informed citizens capable of
making appropriate political decisions for their society.
2. The college/university level, general education should also provide opportunities
for non-science majors to acquaint themselves with and learn to appreciate how
science and technology impacts their daily lives,

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