Miha Lee’s SLO Reflection #1
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Misconception Report for Reflective Practice
(High School Students’ Alternative Ideas about Chemical Bonding)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ASSIGNMENT
The assignment is about high school students’ alternative ideas regarding chemical
bonding. I reviewed a few research papers (Boo, 1998; Coll & Taylor, 2001; De Posada,
1997; Taber, 1995; Taber, 2000; Taber, 2003) in order to find out what students’ ideas about
chemical bonding are “after” chemistry instructions and what they imply for chemistry
education.
First of all, I found the terms for students’ misunderstanding. They include: naive
beliefs, preconceptions, alternative frameworks, children’s science, naive theories, naive
conceptions, intuitive beliefs, intuitive science, learners’ science, and misconceptions. The
term alternative conception is used to mean students’ ideas, manifested “after exposure to
formal models or theories”, which are still at odds with those currently accepted by the
scientific community. Especially, when an alternative conception is used with consistency
over more than one context or event, it is referred to as an alternative framework.
This investigation also revealed prevalent and consistent alternative conceptions
about chemical bonding across a range of ages and cultural settings. Taber named those
alternative conceptions as the Octet Framework because the most common and strong
misconceptions have something to do with the octet rule. A majority of students believed that
the main cause for chemical bonding was for atoms to obtain their full outer shells. The octet
framework was created by chemistry instruction with the octet rule and Lewis model. The
features of the octet framework were pursued and explained.
Furthermore, I examined how the octet framework affects students’ ideas of chemical
bonding. I provided a variety of exemplary misconceptions with respect to ionic bond,
covalent bond, metallic bond, and intermolecular bond. The misconception of energy and
reaction associated with chemical bonding was also explored.
What caused the alternative conceptions was summarized. The most potent cause of
the common misconceptions of high school students is the fact that the contents of chemical
bonding in high school chemistry books heavily rely on such simple model as the octet rule. I
suggested a few ways to fix the problem.
Miha Lee’s SLO Reflection #1
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CONNECTIONS TO THE SLO OF REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
In chemistry, chemical bonding is a fundamental conception that explains the
behavior and change of matter. As a result, my teaching always begins with chemical
bonding, but it seems difficult for my students to understand it because it is abstract. This is
why I chose the topic chemical bonding for this assignment. When I read research articles for
this assignment, I myself could make my pedagogical content knowledge about chemical
bonding deeper enough to improve my teaching for my students.
The cognitive theory in science education suggests that students’ prior knowledge
provide the bedrock on which new ideas can be anchored for student learning. While
appropriate conceptions can act as bridges (or stepping stones) to a new understanding,
inappropriate conceptions can act as barriers. So, as a teacher I need to be familiar with and
fully aware of students’ misconceptions so that I could help students move on from their
alternative ideas to scientific ideas. This assignment assisted me to build up my pedagogical
content knowledge that guides me to design my instruction to modify the misconceptions and
promote conceptual understanding.
The pedagogical skills that I learned to improve my students’ learning seem to be
how to elicit students’ misconceptions and how to help my students confront with their
misconceptions.
REFLECTION
What I learned from this assignment was that teachers’ convenient habits of thinking
and talking are often taken by learners as absolute and literal meanings rather than being
recognized as short-hand. Therefore, we should give heed to the use of such simple model as
the octet rule when we teach chemical bonding. We should try to introduce my aspects of
chemical bonding as a theory to explain matter’s properties. When we teach science, we
present curriculum models that are designed to be matched to the level of complexity and
abstraction that students can most benefit from. The optimum level of simplification is simple
enough to allow students to understand and learn about the topic, yet also rigorous enough to
provide a basis for students to develop further more advanced models later in their studies.
Then, what should I do in order to prevent students from having these
misconceptions from my instruction and help students develop more sophisticated and
scientifically valid ideas? Students’ misconceptions do not fall down unless science teaching
Miha Lee’s SLO Reflection #1
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permits constructions of reasonable and accessible another ideas. This cannot happen by
means of a single operation: students must be conscious of their misconceptions, ideas must
be confronted, students must take on new models accessible to their minds (Strike & Posner,
1992); and finally, students must learn to distinguish the context (macroscopic vs.
microscopic) in which different conceptual schemes can be applied (diSessa, 1993). Thus, I
will make a number of changes in my instruction of chemical bonding:
• introduce the driving force of chemical bonding and reaction. Chemists view the driving
force for all chemical bonding and reactions as the decrease in energy of the system or the
increase in entropy of the universe (Boo, 1998; Taber, 2003). For this reason all elements
except the noble gas exist in states chemically bonded, not isolated, because they are
energetically stable in those states;
• introduce a general notion of bonding based on electrostatic interactions, before exploring
specific bond types in detail.
• emphasize bonding as the interactions that hold structures together rather than being related
to developing full shells.
• consider changing the order of teaching about bonding types to avoid inappropriate specific
aspects of one model being transferred to others. It has been suggested that complexity
increases from metallic, to ionic, to giant covalent, to simple covalent structures (Taber,
2003);
• take time when introducing the “sea of electrons” notion to explore the metaphor so that
learners can use it as the basis for a scientifically appropriate model. When we teach science
using metaphors and analogies, we need to check the cartography of learner’s cognition
before dropping an Ausubelian anchor such as the sea of electrons metaphor so that learners
make the intended sense of them and are not left to guess what the relevance is (Taber, 2003);
• introduce a general notion of bonding based on orbital theory. High school student learn
orbital and electronic configuration of atoms, so they need to know that when atoms
“overlap” their atomic orbitals, they form molecular orbitals that consist of chemical bonding.
In summary, I learned the value of studies that explore learners’ changes in thinking
in depth. So, I will go further to identify alternative conceptions or preferred mental models
in other topics. What’s more, I will devise ways of teaching in which students can develop
and change their mental models so that they can bring them closer to scientific understanding.