Reaction to “Beyond Appearances: Students’
misconceptions about basic chemical ideas”
by Vanessa Barker
Marie Scearce
26 July 2008
This paper1 is huge and I have found it rather difficult to digest. After reading
the first several sections, I felt the need to establish more context for the article.
Therefore, I began to try and place the article in the literature. I have tried
searches on google and various databases through the University of
Pennsylvania Library system. I have not been able to identify this as a published
scholarly article or a book. Once I realized that it was probably published in
Great Britain (A report prepared for the Royal Society of Chemistry) I even tried
accessing a database in Great Britain (through Penn) and was not successful. I
was surprised by the amount of time I spent trying to track the author and the
document down. My conclusion is that the amount of effort I used to try and
establish a context for my self is proportional to my discomfort with digesting the
material presented.
I find the data presented both fascinating and overwhelming. After reading
many passages like “50% of 12 and 13 year olds classify non-rigid solids such as
dough, sponge, sand and sugar separately form coins, glass or chalk” from
section 1.1, my mind starts to sort of numb out. The information and its
implications for teaching chemistry is considerable, however, I find it very
difficult to wrap my head around the organization and presentation. I have to
think to myself, “12 and 13 year olds, that’s like 6th to 7th grade right, I wonder if
anything changes by 9th and 10th grade. Ok, now this sounds like a
misconception to be alert for but now how will I remember it?” From this
observation she goes to a study about the importance of sensory reasoning in 14
year olds and then discusses 11 year-olds ideas about gases. I find my head
11
Barker, Vanessa, Beyond Appearances: Student’s misconceptions about basic chemical ideas,
A report prepared for the Royal Society of Chemistry
Reaction to Beyond Appearances, V. Barker
M. Scearce
26 July 2008
spinning and a little overwhelmed about how to put all this information in a
context that would be helpful and accessible to me in the future.
My gut reaction is in order to make adequate use of the information, I would
need to reprocess each section. This is similar to the recommendation given in
class. For my own use, I could see putting it in a table format that could then be
coupled to my teacher notes on specific units. Therefore, I would need to
append this information about perception of solids to my teacher notes for my
unit where I start to evolve the states of matter concepts.
At the same time, reprocessing the entire document in this manner seems like a
huge undertaking and doesn’t seem like the most effective thing I could be doing
just a few weeks before I start teaching chemistry for the first time. It might be
the kind of task that could be done in a group (like our class) with each section
being reprocessed by one or two people. Then bringing the sections into the
whole group to discuss whether each portion captured all the pieces the others
in the large group felt were important in that particular section.
Even the process I have outlined here is huge in terms of people hours. And
that brings me back to my original questions. Who is Vanessa Barker? Why did
she expend a tremendous amount of effort to collect and relate all this data by
topic? When was the document produced? Has she or any other group
attempted to further process the information since its publication? Are her
conclusions generally accepted? Is there any new data that either corroborates
or challenges the data she presents?
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