Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Award This comprehensive collection of top-level contributions provides a thorough review of the vibrant field of chemistry education. Highly-experienced chemistry professors and education experts cover the latest developments in chemistry learning and teaching, as well as the pivotal role of chemistry for shaping a more sustainable future. Adopting a practice-oriented approach, the current challenges and opportunities posed by chemistry education are critically discussed, highlighting the pitfalls that can occur in teaching chemistry and how to circumvent them. The main topics discussed include best practices, project-based education, blended learning and the role of technology, including e-learning, and science visualization. Hands-on recommendations on how to optimally implement innovative strategies of teaching chemistry at university and high-school levels make this book an essential resource for anybody interested in either teaching or learning chemistry more effectively, from experience chemistry professors to secondary school teachers, from educators with no formal training in didactics to frustrated chemistry students.

This book is aimed at chemistry teachers, teacher educators, chemistry education researchers, and all those who are interested in increasing the relevance of chemistry teaching and learning as well as students' perception of it. The book consists of 20 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a certain issue related to the relevance of chemistry education. These chapters are based on a recently suggested model of the relevance of science education, encompassing individual, societal, and vocational relevance, its present and future implications, as well as its intrinsic and extrinsic aspects. “Two highly distinguished chemical educators, Ingo Eilks and AviHofstein, have brought together 40 internationally renowned colleagues from 16 countries to offer an authoritative view of chemistry teaching today. Between them, the authors, in 20 chapters, give an exceptional description of the current state of chemical education and signpost the future in both research and in the classroom. There is special emphasis on the many attempts to enthuse students with an understanding of the central science, chemistry, which will be helped by having an appreciation of the role of the science in today’s world. Themes which transcend all education such as collaborative work, communication skills, attitudes, inquiry learning and teaching, and problem solving are covered in detail and used in the context of teaching modern chemistry. The book is divided into four parts which describe the individual, the societal, the vocational and economic, and the non-formal dimensions and the editors bring all the disparate leads into a coherent narrative, that will be highly satisfying to experienced and new researchers and to teachers with the daunting task of teaching such an intellectually demanding subject. Just a brief glance at the index and the references will convince anyone interested in chemical education that this book is well worth studying; it is scholarly and readable and has tackled the most important issues in chemical education today and in the foreseeable future.” – Professor David Waddington, Emeritus Professor in Chemistry Education, University of York, United Kingdom

Scientists use arguments to relate the evidence that they select from their investigations and to justify the claims that they make about their observations. This book brings together leading researchers to draw attention to research, policy and practice around the inclusion of argumentation in chemistry education.

Chemical education is essential to everybody because it deals with ideas that play major roles in personal, social, and economic decisions. This book is based on three principles: that all aspects of chemical education should be associated with research; that the development of opportunities for chemical education should be both a continuous process and be linked to research; and that the professional development of all those associated with chemical education should make extensive and diverse use of that research. It is intended for: pre-service and practising chemistry teachers and lecturers; chemistry teacher educators; chemical education researchers; the designers and managers of formal chemical curricula; informal chemical educators; authors of textbooks and curriculum support materials; practising chemists and chemical technologists. It addresses: the relation between chemistry and chemical education; curricula for chemical education; teaching and learning about chemical compounds and chemical change; the development of teachers; the development of chemical education as a field of enquiry. This is mainly done in respect of the full range of formal education contexts (schools, universities, vocational colleges) but also in respect of informal education contexts (books, science centres and museums).

A companion to 'Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research', 'Tools of Chemistry Education Research' provides a continuation of the dialogue regarding chemistry education research.

Chemistry seeks to provide qualitative and quantitative explanations for the observed behaviour of elements and their compounds. Doing so involves making use of three types of representation: the macro (the empirical properties of substances); the sub-micro (the natures of the entities giving rise to those properties); and the symbolic (the number of entities involved in any changes that take place). Although understanding this triplet relationship is a key aspect of chemical education, there is considerable evidence that students find great difficulty in achieving mastery of the ideas involved. In bringing together the work of leading chemistry educators who are researching the triplet relationship at the secondary and university levels, the book discusses the learning involved, the problems that students encounter, and successful approaches to teaching. Based on the reported research, the editors argue for a coherent model for understanding the triplet relationship in chemical education.

Problem solving is central to the teaching and learning of chemistry at secondary, tertiary and post-tertiary levels of education, opening to students and professional chemists alike a whole new world for analysing data, looking for patterns and making deductions. As an important higher-order thinking skill, problem solving also constitutes a major research field in science education. Relevant education research is an ongoing process, with recent developments occurring not only in the area of quantitative/computational problems, but also in qualitative problem solving. The following situations are considered, some general, others with a focus on specific areas of chemistry: quantitative problems, qualitative reasoning, metacognition and resource activation, deconstructing the problem-solving process, an overview of the working memory hypothesis, reasoning with the electron-pushing formalism, scaffolding organic synthesis skills, spectroscopy for structural characterization in organic chemistry, enzyme kinetics, problem solving in the academic chemistry laboratory, chemistry problem-solving in context, team-based/active learning, technology for molecular representations, IR spectra simulation, and computational quantum chemistry tools. The book concludes with methodological and epistemological issues in problem solving research and other perspectives in problem solving in chemistry. With a foreword by George Bodner.