Keith Stephen Taber

The current practice turn in science education emphasises that students should engage in disciplinary practices to develop content, procedural, and epistemic knowledge. One key practice is constructing explanations for natural phenomena, understood here as a reasoned account that integrates theoretical knowledge with the interpretation of empirical evidence to make sense of a phenomenon. Effective guidance in this practice requires teachers to understand both the nature and purpose of scientific explanations. This qualitative multi-case study examines the views of five secondary science teachers using classroom observations, field notes, and semi-structured interviews analysed through thematic and constant comparative methods. Findings show that teachers held multiple, overlapping meanings of the verb explain , which were introduced ambiguously in classroom practice. When probed, participants did not articulate a clear epistemic characterisation of scientific explanations and did not view students’ competence in constructing explanations as a central learning goal, despite acknowledging its importance for scientists. These results reveal a gap between disciplinary expectations and classroom practice and suggest a need for professional development that explicitly addresses these conceptual ambiguities.

A key area of concern in education in STEM subjects has been the common phenomenon that learners come to classes already holding “misconceptions” (alternative conceptions) related to the topics they are to be taught, and these ideas often impede learning of the canonical curriculum accounts. Some such conceptions are passed from person to person, but humans inherently make sense of phenomena they experience – a creative process leading to novel personal conceptions. As gifted learners tend to be creative thinkers and voracious independent learners reading around topics of personal interest, they may form especially coherent and persuasive alternative ways of making sense of topics. This chapter explores how teachers may respond to this challenge in the context of classroom engineering activities.

How should chemistry be taught in schools, colleges, and universities? Chemical Pedagogy discusses teaching approaches and techniques, the reasoning behind them, and the evidence for their effectiveness. The book surveys a wide range of different pedagogic strategies and tactics that have been recommended to better engage learners and provide more effective chemistry teaching. These accounts are supported by an initial introduction to some key ideas and debates about pedagogy - the science of teaching. Chemical Pedagogy discusses how teaching innovations can be tested to inform research-based practice. Through this book, the author explores the challenges of carrying out valid experimental studies in education, and the impediments to generalising study results to diverse teaching and learning contexts. As a result, the author highlights both the need to read published studies critically and the value of teachers and lecturers testing out recommended innovations in their own classrooms. Chemical Pedagogy introduces core principles – from research into human cognition and learning – to provide a theoretical perspective on how to best teach for engagement and understanding. An examination of some of the more contentious debates about pedagogy leads to the advice to seek ‘optimally guided instruction’ which balances the challenge offered to learners with the level of support provided. This provides a framework for discussing a wide range of teaching approaches and techniques that have been recommended to those teaching chemistry across educational levels, including both those intended to replace ‘teaching from the front’ and others that can be built into traditional lecture courses to enhance the learning experience.

A perspective on learning and teaching that considers knowledge must be constructed by the individual learner using available interpretive resources, and where learners are likely to misconstrue instruction without well-designed teaching that is informed by knowledge of learners’ ideas.

A recent study in Chemistry Education Research and Practice highlights the common pattern of student thinking known as ‘the octet framework’, and notes how it seems to relate to, but be inconsistent with, the octet rule: an idea commonly taught in introductory chemistry classes. The study noted the common feature of learners extending the octet rule into ‘a driving force’ for chemical change, but analysis also noted two other features of the alternative conceptual framework. It is argued here that these research findings reflect a key problem in chemistry education: one that the research community should prioritise for further investigation.