Teaching for conceptual change

• To show the relationship between macro phenomena and micro mechanisms
• To find ways to deepen students’ understanding and trigger
  conceptual change

This program explores one of the central problems in teaching chemistry–how to encourage students to create conceptual models for chemical changes. This requires that students make observations at a macroscopic level and then try to explain how the changes occur by visualizing those molecular micro-processes, which can only be thought about or imagined. Conceptual change must occur in order for students to understand chemical phenomena. Teaching for conceptual change poses a great challenge to teachers because they must create a rich variety of models in order to help students visualize microenvironments and processes that occur within them.

“The most powerful thing you can do when you’re learning chemistry is to zoom down in your mind’s eye to the molecular level and try to imagine what is going on and, in a sense, try to understand the personalities of the reactants and products. If you can use more than one model to illustrate something, having each model showing a different aspect of the information conveyed, that’s ideal.”

Dr. Roy Tasker
Associate Professor, Univ. of Western Sydney

Proceed to Unit 2.1