Using laboratory activities enhanced with concept cartoons to support progression in students’ understanding of acid-base concepts

The concepts of acid-base chemistry comprise the basis for this paper. This topic was chosen because of the ubiquitous nature of acid-base chemistry in everyday life, the fact that this area of chemistry involves multiple concepts, and the importance of acid-base chemistry for learning the other topics in chemistry. Additionally, acid-base chemistry is a difficult topic for students to learn (Demerouti, Kousathana & Tsaparlis, 2004; Demircioğlu, Özmen & Ayas, 2004; Özmen, Demircioğlu & Coll, 2009; Sisovic & Bojovic, 2000). In brief, the literature reports student alternative conceptions in acid-base chemistry as widespread, occurring at various grade levels and that conventional teaching strategies seem unable to rectify students’ nonscientific beliefs. Thus, here we report research about an intervention intended to help students’ learning acid-base chemistry more effectively.

In Turkish Science and Technology curriculum, acid and base concepts are first mentioned in the unit of “the structure and properties of the matter” in grade 8. In this unit, students are introduced the basic concepts related to acids and bases such as definition of acid and base concepts, the properties of acids and bases, diagnosing of acids and bases, pH and pOH concepts, acids and bases encountered in daily life, damage of acids and bases, and safety while studying acids and bases. In this curriculum, teachers are asked to apply a student-centered instruction with constructivist manner and curriculum includes lots of laboratory activities and experiments. However, there is not a necessity for preparing students to laboratory activities mentally, diagnosing students’ pre- and alternative conceptions, and designing laboratory activities based on these beliefs. On the other hand, there has been much discussion in science education literature about the importance of effective preparation by students for laboratory sessions (Byers, 2002; Johnstone, Sleet & Vianna, 1994; Sirhan, Johnstone & Reid, 1999). Mental preparation of the students for laboratory work is important in this process. A student entering into laboratory without some preparation is likely to spend hours of fruitless activity resulting in limited learning (Kelly & Finlayson, 2009). Teachers should activate students mentally, elicit their own ideas and raise awareness with their initial conceptions related the concepts under study before the hands-on laboratory activities. With this manner, the concept cartoons may support the teachers in the elicitation process of making the learners’ ideas explicit (Stephenson & Warwick, 2002). Students who have dissatisfaction with their initial ideas will probably be more careful while doing laboratory activities and try to remove their alternative conceptions by learning scientifically acceptable ones. With this regard, we wanted to use the concept cartoons to build up discussion environment for students before confront them with laboratory activities. In such an environment, students will have the chance to discuss each other and realize their alternative and/or inadequate beliefs. In summary, we tried to combine concept cartoons with laboratory activities to make students mentally activated, to enhance students’ performance while doing the activities, and to provide them an opportunity to discuss each other. This may help them to see their inadequate initial beliefs and to make the laboratory activities more conscious. Besides, although there are many studies investigating the effectiveness of laboratory activities on learning, little empirical research has been conducted on concept cartoons to examine their usefulness in science teaching. From this point of view, the purpose of this study is to find out the effectiveness of concept cartoons enhanced laboratory activities for teaching of concepts of acid-base chemistry in primary school. The specific research questions for this inquiry are:

Is an intervention involving the use of concept cartoons enhanced laboratory activities more effective in improving students’ understanding of acid-base chemistry than the instruction based on the laboratory activities?

How students’ alternative conceptions do change through the implementation?