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How Students in Croatian Secondary Schools Understand Chemical Equilibrium

Chemical equilibrium is one of the basic concepts in both secondary schools and university chemistry curriculum and it was a subject of many educational studies(1, 2). Often misconceptions in understanding of its dinamic nature have been found. Some problems concerning the chemical equilibrium have been set in the State graduation exam for secondary schools officially carried out for the first time in the 2009/2010 academic year as well as in the experimental State graduation exams of 2007 to 2009. This research was inspired by inadequate results of mentioned experimental exams. In total, the sample of 220 freshmen of the Faculty of Science having six year chemistry education was observed through 2007 to 2009 period. The aim of the research was to find out: (i) the level of understanding of the chemical equilibrium, (ii) the most frequent alternative concepts of understanding the chemical equilibrium, (iii) the level of durability of knowledge acquired in secondary school, as well as its applicability in the university subject of General Chemistry, and (iv) the appropriateness of questions asked in the experimental State graduation exams of 2007 to 2009. Our test comprised of three open-ended questions. Two of these questions have already been asked in experimental State graduation exams of 2007 to 2009, and the third one was based on the model of "Conceptual Questions" on Le Chatelier's Principle(3). The issue of understanding the concept of chemical equilibrium has not been investigated in Croatia untill now, neither over students or teachers population. The observed grups of freshmen exhibited the most of the misconceptions already described in chemical education literature. Similarly as it had been shown by the other authors(4), we found that misunderstanding is present on the conceptual as well as on the symbolic level. In order to understand the background of the situation, we plan to submit the teachers comunity to the similar investigation. It is planned to make good use of the findings on the misconceptions about chemical equilibrium (i) in life-long learning education for in-service teachers, (ii) in lectures of Methods of teaching chemistry as a subject in pre-service teacher study programme, (iii) in development of didactic methods to help students understand dynamic chemical equilibrium using animations on interactive whiteboard. (1) Banerjee, A.C. (1991, October). International Journal of Science Education, (Vol 13, Issue 4), 487 - 494 (2) D. Cheung, D. (2009). Using think- aloud protocols to investigate secondary school chemistry teachers´ misconceptions about chemical equilibrium, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 10, 97-108. (3) Benjamin P., & Huddle, (1998)., J. Chem. Educ., 75, 1175-1175. (4) Raviolo, A., & Garritz, A (2009). Analogies in the teaching of chemical equilibrium: a synthesis/analysis of the literature, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 10, 5-13.

chemical equilibrium ; Croatian schools ; conceptual understanding

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