Dušica D. Milenković

Diagnosing the quality of high school students’ and pre-service chemistry teachers’ cognitive structures in organic chemistry by using students’ generated systemic synthesis questions

The importance of well elaborated cognitive structures in a science knowledge domain has been noted in many studies. Therefore, the main aim of this particular study was to employ a new diagrammatic assessment approach, students’ generated systemic synthesis questions (SSynQs), to evaluate and compare the quality of high school students’ and pre-service chemistry teachers’ cognitive structures in the organic chemistry domain. We used a mixed research sample (N = 83), and SSynQs were constructed following the high school chemical curriculum in the Republic of Serbia. Besides the overall quality of the cognitive structures, the size (extent) and strength (complexity) of the conceptual structures, as external representations of cognitive structures, were also analysed. It was found that both high school students and pre-service chemistry teachers had a substantial size of the conceptual structures, showing relatively good knowledge about IUPAC naming and structures of organic compounds, except for ethers. However, the strength of the conceptual structures, or inter-correlations between organic chemistry concepts, was evaluated as weak within high school students, and medium within pre-service chemistry teachers. This resulted in the identification of three main learning difficulties (LDs), accompanied by a lack of understanding (LU) about the chemical properties and relations of organic compounds. It was surprising to find that all identified LDs and LUs within high school students also appeared within pre-service chemistry teachers. What is more, the most desired and expected cognitive structures (distinguished multidimensional cognitive structures) without LDs and LUs appeared within high school students.

Enhancement and assessment of students’ systems thinking skills by application of systemic synthesis questions in the organic chemistry course

Many studies in the field of science education have emphasized the fact that systems thinking is a very important higher-order thinking skill that should be fostered during classes. However, more attention has been dedicated to the different ways of the assessment of systems thinking skills, and less to their enhancement. Taking this into consideration, the goal of this study was not only to validate the systems thinking skills of secondary school students, but also to help students in the complex process of their development. With this goal, new instructional and assessment tools – systemic synthesis questions [SSynQs], were constructed, and an experiment with one experimental (E) and one control (C) group was conducted during organic chemistry classes. Namely, the instructional teaching/learning method for both E and C groups was the same in processing new contents, but different on classes for the revision of the selected organic chemistry contents. The results showed that students exposed to the new instructional method (E group) achieved higher performance scores on three different types of systems thinking than students from the C group, who were taught by the traditional method. The greatest difference between the groups was found in the most complex dimension of systems thinking construct – in the II level of procedural systems thinking. Along with this dimension, structural systems thinking and the I level of the procedural systems thinking were also observed.