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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 16, Issue 2, Article 10 (Dec., 2015) |
The result of the study demonstrated that preservice science teachers’ attitudes towards chemistry were at medium level and they had some misconceptions about chemical kinetics. There is not a statistically significant relationship between preservice science teachers’ attitudes towards chemistry and their misconceptions related to chemical kinetics.
This study revealed that preservice science teachers had medium attitudes towards chemistry and the reason of this could be the characteristics of the sample. The sample of the study was preservice science teachers and they are engaged in more science education courses and they do laboratory experiments about science (physics, chemistry, and biology). If they took much more chemistry courses and laboratory experiments about chemistry we could observe much more positively developed attitudes towards chemistry. We may suggest much more chemistry-related courses in science teacher education programs. Pre-service teachers’ medium attitudes toward chemistry could suggest that they could have medium scientific literacy since the development of scientific literacy requires positive attitudes toward science. Thus, in order to develop pre-service teachers’ scientific literacy, the activities promoting their attitudes toward science could be developed. Another result of this study is that there is not a statistically significant relationship between preservice science teachers’ attitudes towards chemistry and their misconceptions about chemical kinetics. The result of the study demonstrated that there is not a significant relationship between preservice science teachers’ attitudes towards chemistry and students’ understanding of the chemical kinetics. For high school students, Salta & Tzougraki (2004) found a significant relationship between attitudes towards chemistry and science achievement. This shows that the relationship patterns between students’ attitudes towards chemistry and understanding of chemistry topics may depend on sample characteristics. Therefore, this relationship pattern should be studied considering sample characteristics. According to the result of the present study, it could be stated that pre-service teachers could have misconceptions although they have higher attitudes toward chemistry. In the same way, pre-service teachers could not have misconceptions although they lower attitudes toward chemistry. Thus, activities that are promoting pre-service teachers’ attitudes toward chemistry could not have influence on their misconceptions.
Investigation of preservice science teachers’ understanding about chemical kinetics is essential since one of the sources of students’ misconceptions is teachers (Bar & Travis, 1991,references). By revealing the misconceptions of the preservice science teachers’ about chemical kinetics, teaching methods could be developed in order to overcome preservice science teachers’ misconceptions and so their students’ misconceptions could be remediated. Pre-service teachers’ misconceptions could be remediated by using hands on activities and laboratory practices since chemical kinetics concepts are abstract (how developed instruction to remediate misconceptions please discuss). The present study revealed some misconceptions about the chemical kinetics topic. Since pre-service teachers have misconceptions about chemical kinetics topic then it could be stated that pre-service teachers could not develop scientific literacy. In order to develop scientific literacy, pre-service teachers should have coherent understanding of the chemical kinetics topics.
Preservice science teachers generally had difficulties in understanding of the reaction rate that equals to the multiplication of reactants’ concentration, and also they confused with the meaning of the reaction intermediate and catalyst in a reaction mechanism.
Also, in this study students had difficulty in understanding of the idea in that in exothermic reactions increasing the temperature decreases the rate of reactions. Also students hold the misconception in which in only endothermic reactions, increasing the temperature increases the rate of reactions. These results are in line with the findings of the studies of Balcı (2006) and Kolomuc and Tekin (2011). This result suggests that students could confuse with the concept of enthalpy and reaction rate.Also, students had difficulty in understanding of the reaction rate vs time graph. Students had difficulty in understanding of some chemical processes: reaction rate is the time that reactants turn into products; reaction rate in a chemical reaction means the process of reactants to form products; and reaction rate is an amount of substance that turns into product in a certain temperature and concentration. Cakmakci, Donnelly and Leach (2005) also found the same misconceptions for preservice chemistry teachers.
According to the results of the Chemical Kinetics Concept test, students had misconceptions about key concepts of reaction rate. Thus, preservice science teachers’ courses should be designed in order to overcome their misconceptions on these essential chemistry concepts. Also, teaching methods for promoting conceptual change could be designed in order to remediate the misconceptions. Misconceptions are resistant to change so preservice science teachers could be aware of their misconceptions on these chemistry concepts and processes during their science teacher education and so they could eliminate them.
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