Challenging Chemical Misconceptions

in the Classroom?

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Teacher Fellowship project 2000-1

Keith S. Taber
Homerton College, University of Cambridge
&
Royal Society of Chemistry

presented to the symposium

Key Notes in Chemistry Education

at the

British Educational Research Association

Annual Conference, Cardiff Univesity, September 7-10 2000
Taber, K. S.

Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

2000 © Keith S. Taber

presented to the symposium

Key Notes in Chemistry Education
at the
British Educational Research Association
Annual Conference 2000, University of Cardiff

Dr. Keith Taber

Senior Lecturer in Science Education
Homerton College, University of Cambridge

Royal Society of Chemistry Teacher Fellow 2000-2001

c/o
Education Dept.
Royal Society of Chemistry
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London W1V 0BN

e-mail: kst24@cam.ac.uk

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

Abstract

It is now well established that most learners in schools and colleges have alternative
conceptions (or ‘misconceptions’) about aspects of the science curriculum. Indeed such
alternative conceptions have been found in (virtually?) all topics at all grade levels where
researchers have thought to look for them. Teachers are now trained to review the likely
misconceptions associated with a topic as part of their lesson preparation.

Yet while there is a great deal of information available about the range and ingenuity of
pupils’ alternative ideas, there is less practical help for teachers in dealing with them. The
assumption is that by being aware of common misconceptions the teacher will plan
teaching that challenges and overcomes them. Yet research suggests that many ideas are
idiosyncratic, and that some alternative conceptions are extremely stable despite explicit
challenges in the classroom. Published projects that have developed ‘constructivist’
teaching approaches have had resource support far beyond that available to most
practitioners.

Research into learners’ ideas has been (at least in part) moving beyond the ‘stamp
collecting’ stage of simply observing and recording the enormous range of
misconceptions out there, to more theoretically ground studies which try to explore the
‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of conceptual development. In time this research may prove to be of
great value to classroom teachers.

In the meantime teachers can be supported by being provided with materials that are
designed to help them elicit and challenge common misconceptions. The Royal Society
of Chemistry (RSC) is funding a Teacher Fellowship to develop such materials for key
science concepts relating to the learning of chemistry at secondary/sixth form level. It is
intended to provide materials that enable classroom teachers to identify and challenge
common ‘misconceptions’ in their pupils. The RSC will publish and distribute the
resources free at the end of the project.

Key words: constructivism, learning chemistry, challenging misconceptions, free

resources.

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Taber, K. S.

Challenging Chemical Misconceptions in the Classroom?: The

Royal Society of Chemistry Teacher Fellowship project 2000-1

1. Introduction: alternative conceptions and constructvism.

2. Practitioners’ responses to alternative conceptions.

3. Beyond ‘stamp collecting’.

4. The RSC teacher fellowship project (1): How can the RSC help classroom teachers?

5. The RSC teacher fellowship project (2): How can teachers help the RSC project?

6. Hors d’oeuvre: some examples of pupil responses.

7. Conclusion: the future of alternative conceptions research?

1. Introduction: alternative conceptions and constructvism.

Children often have ideas about aspects of ‘the way the world works’ which are at
variance with the scientific models. This is explained through the ‘constructivist’ notion
that humans build up their own models of the world based on their experiences. 1 Even
young children behave like scientists in developing models to represent their world. 2
However, they are often rather poor scientists who have not studied Popper’s ideas about
the importance of ‘falsification’! 3 Once these naive conceptual structures start to develop
they become the frameworks through which the world is understood. As language is
often poetic and imprecise, and children’s early informers are often not well versed in
cutting edge science, there is plenty of scope for alternative ideas to become extensive
and well established.

Pupils (and students) will bring these alternative ideas to their science lessons. As they do
not realise their ideas are at odds with accepted science, they will expect the teacher’s
words to make sense in terms of their existing notions. More often than not, ‘sense’ can
be made of science lessons in terms of alternative conceptions. Sadly, it is often not the
sense intended by the teacher! 4

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

If the teacher is not aware of the pupils’ ideas, then their responses in class may be
judged to be ‘confused’ or ‘non-sensical’, and to represent inattention or lack of
understanding, or considered to be ‘poorly expressed’ due to limited linguistic ability. Of
course, there may often be inattention, and even with attention there often may be
misunderstanding, but this is not the same as having no understanding: the pupil may be
understanding differently. Understanding differently is still ‘wrong’ from a curriculum
viewpoint, but it is a different pedagogic problem to not understanding! Of course pupils
may often lack linguistic skills, and express their ideas poorly, but sometimes they are
expressing their ideas well, those ideas just match the teacher’s ideas poorly. Again, this
is a problem for the teacher, but, again, it is a different problem.

So constructivism tells teachers that they did indeed have a problem teaching scientific
ideas (as well they knew) but that often it may not be the problem they thought it was!

This is very important. If a pupil does not understand an idea because it does not make
sense, then certain remedial action is appropriate. If the material makes perfect sense to
the pupil in terms of a different, alternative, understanding, then a different course of
action is needed.

If a pupil can not clearly explain her ideas (so as to produce a satisfactory examination
response) a certain type of help is needed; but if the pupil is explaining alternative ideas
clearly, but they seem confused because the teacher is thinking along different lines, then
a different sort of help is needed.

It is important then that teachers recognise when pupils are ‘understanding differently’
and know how to respond to this, just as they need to recognise and know how to respond
to limited comprehension or lack of expression.

2. Practitioners’ responses to alternative conceptions.

As a general rule humans have a natural drive to make sense of the world. Most pupils
who do not understand a lesson would want to, and if the teacher works with them can be
made to ‘learn the lesson’. Perhaps the teacher just needs to go through the steps more
slowly, or go over the meaning of some of the vocabulary. Perhaps the teacher needs to
introduce some sort of analogy or metaphor that will help the pupil understand.

However, when a pupil holds an alternative conception, the natural motivation to

understand does not operate - because the pupils already think they understand the topic:
it makes sense to them.

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Taber, K. S.

So - once the teacher is aware that an alternative conceptions is operating - it is necessary

to make the pupils aware that they have not understood the scientific idea. Before the
teacher can try and make the material make (the intended) sense for the pupil, they have
to persuade them that their current ideas do not make sense. In other words, the
alternative conceptions have to be challenged.

This is necessary because there is a vast amount of research that shows that ignoring the
alternative conceptions, and just trying to teach over them, seldom works. Occasionally a
pupil might simply take up the teacher’s new way of looking at things: more often the
pupil assimilates the new examples and terms into their existing version, or produces
some sort of amalgam of the two, or learns the new material by rote, only to revert to
their existing ideas over the subsequent weeks or months.

The research that has looked at using these ideas in teaching (rather than just collecting
examples of kooky science) shows that teachers need to start by making explicit pupils’
existing understanding, and then work from there. 5 The national curriculum for Initial
Teacher Training actually require student teachers to show they do this. 6

However, it requires a superbly confident teacher, with plenty of time for critical
reflection - let alone lesson preparation - to do much more than pay lip service to these
ideas. After all, if you start a new topic on Monday afternoon, and the next lesson is
Wednesday morning, it is cutting things rather fine to leave prep. for Wednesday till after
you have analysed the pupils’ work from the elicitation lesson on Monday. Especially
when there are half a dozen other classes to worry about in between!

This is not in any sense to undermine the constuctivist approach, but to recognise the
inherent difficulties. The more experience a teacher develops, the greater their reservoir
of examples, tricks, demonstrations, metaphors, images etc., the easier it is to see
teaching as a real-time interactive process: but the realities of school life (and the
expectations of Ofsted etc.) require teachers to largely work from pre-planned work
schemes. And our technicians are usually grateful for this!

There are published examples of constructivist teaching schemes in action, from Ros
Driver’s CLISP project for example. 7 These seem to be successful, without relying on
superhuman efforts. However, they do represent curriculum development projects where
time, thought and access to peers and expert consultants were made available.
Presumably each of the teachers involved in those reported projects were simultaneously
teaching other topics to their other classes - and it is likely they were only able to apply
the constructivist approach to a much more limited extent in these more ‘normal’
teaching contexts.

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

3. Beyond ‘stamp collecting’.

Much of the research into alternative conceptions in science has been characterised as
‘stamp collecting’ or ‘butterfly collecting’. Researchers have been a bit like Darwin and
Wallace at the stage where they are still amassing their collections and thinking ‘that’s an
interesting specimen’, without any meaningful theorising. A lot of these new Darwins
have presented their specimens to the appropriate museums (i.e. science education
journals) and left it for others to devise an ‘Origin of Conceptions’. I suspect there are
also a great many Wallaces out there as well, who have found that many of their most
interesting specimens have ended up shipwrecked at the bottom of the seas of masters’
dissertations and oceans of doctoral theses, with little hope of ever being brought back to
the surface.

It is some years since it was pointed out that if research into children’s ideas was going to
be of maximum use to teachers something more was required than catalogues of
conceptions elicited from random individuals or groups of learners.

To take us forward studies need to be sufficiently detailed to tell us not just about the
conceptions themselves, but about conceptual change. We need to know why certain
types of conceptions are acquired, and how to challenge them effectively, how to
usefully build on the ideas children bring to lessons, and how to avoid our teaching being
misinterpreted and commonly leading to ‘misconceptions’.

In my view we need to look at individual pupils’ thinking in much more detail to study
how ideas change over time, and how different concept areas are related in the pupils’
minds. Of course some of this work exists, and there are some useful theoretical
contributions, but we are far from having an understanding that enables research to
effectively inform the planning and execution of science teaching at any level of detail.

By this I mean that we are unable to turn to an area of the curriculum and make useful
predictions (ab initio) about the types of alternative conceptions that we will find, and
how best to deal with them. Perhaps this is an unrealistic aspiration, but the lack of such
a ‘science’ of science teaching is why teaching according to constructivist principles is so
difficult in practice.

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Taber, K. S.

4. The RSC teacher fellowship project (1): How can the RSC
help classroom teachers?

Of course, there are sources which give advice about how to approach certain science
topics, and some of this is based on good research into learners’ ideas and how to
develop them. Yet, to a large extent, the best that is on offer to teachers for most topics -
certainly without undertaking a search in a research orientated library - are secondary
sources which summarise some of the literature on common misconceptions that are
likely to be found in most classes. 8

This is very useful as it alerts the teacher to key ‘barriers’ to the intended learning, and
both makes it more likely that the teacher will spot when pupils are applying these ideas,
and that the teacher will stop to check pupils’ understandings of the material at the most
appropriate points.

However, if the teacher wishes to go beyond this and try and elicit alternative
conceptions and actively challenge them, considerable work may be involved. Many
teachers who have committed to this approach find it worthwhile, and there are
straightforward general techniques that may be used to explore pupils’ ideas (such as
concept mapping). Yet if most teachers are to pay more than lip-service to becoming
‘constructivists’ in their classroom practice, they will need more support - at least to get
them started. A project being funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is
hoping to provide some of that support.

Each year the RSC funds a Teacher Fellow to work on some aspect of supporting the
teaching of chemistry/science. During the current academic year I will be seconded to the
RSC as Teacher Fellow to develop materials to support classroom teachers (at secondary
and sixth form level) challenge common misconceptions.

The intention is to provide materials that will be sent (free of charge) by the RSC to UK
schools and colleges. These materials will hopefully include a variety of exercises for use
in the classroom, as well as supporting information. The exercises will be designed to
help teachers find out if their own pupils hold some of the alternative conceptions
reported in the literature. The supporting materials will explain the ‘misconceptions’,
and their significance, and provide support in challenging them . It is expected that many
of the exercises may act as suitable starting points for classroom discussion that can
compare the scientific models with the alternative views suggested by pupils.

Although there will not be the time to produce complete teaching schemes (and the
intention is to provide exercises that will slot into existing teaching programmes), it is
hoped that materials will be provided that will address some of the key concepts in
chemistry, and basic science, where research suggests alternative ideas that block
intended learning are commonly encountered.

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

5. The RSC teacher fellowship project (2): How can teachers

help the RSC project?

Although it is possible for an experienced teacher to spend some time reading research
papers in a University library and then write exercises that are meant to elicit alternative
conceptions and make learners question their thinking about key chemical ideas; this is
no guarantee that the materials will be effective in the classroom.

It is hoped that the materials to be published and distributed by the RSC will have been
tried out with real pupils and students in a variety of ‘normal’ classes. Teachers of
science/chemistry are invited to try out sample exercises with their classes, and to read
through, and comment on, drafts of the supporting documentation.

Trials of materials will enable drafts to be tweaked to ensure they are suitable for the
intended readership, and will provide samples of pupils’/students’ comments that can be
used as examples in the final publication.

A large number of teachers have already expressed an interest in helping with the project,
but clearly it is only possible to usefully try out exercises for topics with classes at an
appropriate stage of their course, and the work is to be completed in one year, so any
more volunteers are welcome!

It is hoped that the authentic involvement of a range of teachers and their pupils’ in a
variety of schools and colleges will ensure that the final product is something that will be
widely used in schools, and not just gather dust on a prep. room shelf.

6. Hors d’oeuvre: some examples of pupil responses.

The project only started officially on the 1st September, so it is too early to provide much
detail of the materials that will be developed. However, it is possible to give you some
tasters from some probes I have already drafted based on my previous research, based on
a study of A level students’ understanding of chemical bonding.

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Taber, K. S.

Consider the three chemical species shown in figure 1:

Use Word 6.0c or later to

view Macintosh picture.

Figure 1: three chemical species

Which of these species is more stable?

This is a somewhat ambiguous question. If we are talking about which is hardest to

ionise, then I guess we would all agree it is the cation.

If, instead, we consider which is least likely to either pick-up or shed an electron, then I
think we would decide the atom: after all it is neutral so it will not strongly attract any
other species.

Clearly the question is open to interpretation, as we think about possible contexts in

which we might be answering the question.

Previous research suggests that students strongly associate stability with ‘octets’ or full
outer shells. Most chemists do, but probably not to the extent of many A level students.

The diagrams were used as the basis of a ‘chemical stability probe’. The probe compares
each pair of diagrams, and offers four options. For example:

• A is more stable than B

• A and B are equally stable.
• A is less stable than B
• I do not know which statement is correct.

Respondents are asked to select a response and give their reasons. The probe has been
tried by a number of groups now. For example, thirteen A level students at a sixth form
College have had a look at this. 11/13 thought that the cation was more stable than the
atom. One respondent thought the opposite, and one did not know.

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

I think that in the absence of any given chemical context the best response would be that
the neutral atom would be the most stable. We might argue about this, but more
interestingly 10/13 of these A level students who had all studied basic A level chemistry
topics thought that the neutral atom was less stable than the sodium anion! This is not a
freak result, as I have had similar responses from other institutions.

So clever young people taking our ‘gold standard’ qualification believe that a the sodium
seven-minus anion - something they have never come across in their studies - having a
large excess of charge, and something that is an anion of a strong metal, is a stable
species!

Why?

Well a typical reason given is that “C [the anion] has a full outer shell of electrons”.

(Of course, this is not true anyway, as a full outer shell for sodium would require 18
electrons, not 8!)

When I started teaching chemistry I would never have expected this. Indeed even when I
was undertaking research which kept turning up references to octets / full shells as the
key explanatory principle in chemistry, I still would not have expected this. 9 Only when
I found that over four-fifths of respondents agreed with a statement in another exercise
that “the [sodium] atom would become stable if it either lost one electron or gained seven
electrons” did I devise the probe I am referring to here. 10

Now if I was teaching A level chemistry now, I would find it very useful to be aware that
most of my students thought that octets of electrons provided so much stability that metal
atoms would readily form highly charged anions to obtain octets. I would be most
unlikely to spot this - it seems so crazy - by chance. Yet now that the research has been
done it is possible to provide teachers with a simple one page exercise which diagnoses
whether students think this, and provides a background for a class discussion of the
issues. This is the type of material that the RSC project can provide, which saves the
teacher either having to spend considerable time repeating the original research, or
reading the research journals, and then having to think about how to go about checking
the students’ ideas to see if they are thinking that way.

I will give you another related example:

Figure 2 gives a more explicit representation of the processes by which a sodium atom
may become an ion and vice versa. It sets the process outside of a chemical context, and
by showing the electron provides a slightly less ambiguous task.

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Taber, K. S.

Use Word 6.0c or later to

view Macintosh picture.

Figure 2: atom, ion & electron

This probe was intended to relate the notion of ‘stability’ - as considered above - to that
of ‘reactivity’, which may (or may not) be seen as antonyms. However, here I would just
like to consider the notion of which process is seen as likely to occur. The format is
similar to the previous probe, with a multiple choice section of four options (including a
‘I do not know’ option), and space for an explanation.

For one part of the exercise the four options were:

• The sodium atom will emit an electron to become an ion.
• The sodium ion and electron will combine to become an atom.
• Neither of the changes suggested above will occur.
• I do not know which statement is correct.

This exercise has been undertaken by over fifty Y10 pupils in one school. Of 54 pupils
answering that item, 3 did not know what would happen, 7 thought neither process would
occur, and 1 thought the atom and electron would combine. 43, that is four-fifths,
thought that the atom would emit an electron.

Why?

There we a range of suggestions, but many were variations on the theme of:

“To be stable the sodium atom needs to get rid of an electron to make it stable. It then
becomes Na1+”

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

Of course we talk about the stability of the sodium cation, but many pupils take this to
mean that a neutral atom will spontaneously emit an electron, whereas a positive ion can
not attract an electron if it means losing a full shell. Basic electrostatics is seldom taken
into account. Overall: 2% correct, 93% wrong. As a teacher, I would find it useful to be
aware that my pupils are thinking that way.

One fair criticism of the questions discussed above is that chemistry usually deals with
real chemical contexts rather than abstract ‘what if’ questions about isolated atoms and
electrons. However, the rationales used in the simplified situations discussed are carried
over into more ‘chemically relevant’ examples.

Consider another probe. This commences with some information about a reaction:

Hydrogen reacts with fluorine to give hydrogen fluoride. The equation

for this reaction is:

H2(g) + F2(g)  2HF(g)

The word equation is:
hydrogen + fluorine  hydrogen fluoride

Then a diagram is presented:

Use Word 6.0c or later to

view Macintosh picture.

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Taber, K. S.

Figure 3: why do H2 and F2 react?

The respondents are then asked:

“In your own words, explain why you think hydrogen reacts with fluorine:”

This was undertaken by 29 A level students in a school sixth form. Here is an example of
the explanation given by one student:

“Fluorine is a halogen and has 7 outer electrons. To be stable it would like 8 electrons in
its outer shell. By covalently bonding with the hydrogen atom which would like 2
electrons in its outer shell they form hydrogen fluoride which is stable”

Yet, the reaction equation given clearly refers to H2 and Cl2. The figure shows the
molecules of chlorine and hydrogen where chlorine already has “8 electrons in its outer
shell” and hydrogen already has “2 electrons in its outer shell”.

If explaining chemical reactions is important in chemistry then this student does not seem
to have a very sensible explanation. In that particular group of students there were 24
explanations much like this - four fifths of the group think they know why this reaction
will occur, but their explanations are contradicted by the information given in the
question! Again, as a classroom teacher, this reveals a significant source of
misunderstanding among most of the students, that may not have been obvious to the
teacher without using the exercise.

7. Conclusion: the future of alternative conceptions research?

Research into learners’ ideas in science has been a major activity for several decades. If it
is to continue to be a ‘progressive’ research programme it needs to go well beyond the
collection and cataloguing of quaint misconceptions.

We need research that can be used in teacher training to inform teachers of the ‘hows’
and ‘whys’ of conceptual development, so that practising teachers have an integrated
framework for understanding learning and curriculum that enables them to plan and teach
as contructivists. It is one thing to accept the premise that learners have to re-construct
knowledge rather than just absorb it: it is another to know how to teach accordingly
within the resource constraints in real classrooms.

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 Challenging chemical misconceptions in the classroom?

At the moment we do not have this theoretical structure, and true constructivist teaching
requires a level of research activity within the classroom that teachers do not have the
time for (even assuming they have the training, the confidence, and the inclination). By
its nature, constructivist teaching requires close attention to individual learners, and it
may transpire that pupils and students are so different that teachers will always have to
spend a lot of time diagnosing the idiosyncrasies of each learner if they want to teach
effectively. Yet, it is also possible that there may be enough commonality in most classes
to be able to help teachers make short-cuts.

We just do not yet know enough. We know some alternative conceptions are very
common, and some seem most rare. Some may be easily overcome, and others seem
extremely resilient. Theory tells us that some are best seen as staging posts or stepping
stones to scientific knowledge, rather than as obstacles. Some may be best seem as
acceptable adjuncts to scientific knowledge, or alternative narratives, rather than as
unacceptable competitors. Perhaps a few are best dealt with by ignoring them, in the
hope that they will wither, whilst many others need a head-on assault.

There are too many uncertainties for us to expect all classroom teachers to fully adopt the
constructivist approach. Hopefully, in time, the research programme will start to provide
a more ordered understanding of learners’ ideas in science. In the meantime, perhaps
projects such as this RSC sponsored project will at least provide some helpful exemplars
of useful exercises, and some short-cuts to diagnosing and challenging common
alternative conceptions, so that teachers are not expected to start from scratch will all
their classes.

References.

15
1
Pope, Maureen, & Gilbert, John (1983) Personal experience and the construction of knowledge in science, Science
Education, 67 (2), pp.193-203.
2
Driver, Rosalind (1983) The Pupil as Scientist?, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
3
Wolpert, L. (1992) The Unnatural Nature of Science, London: Faber & Faber.
4
Taber, K. S. (1999) Alternative conceptual frameworks in chemistry, Education in Chemistry, 36 (5) pp.135-137.
5
Driver, Rosalind & Oldham, Valerie (1986) A constructivist approach to curriculum development in science, Studies in
Science Education, 13, pp.105-122.
6
DfEE 1998 Circular 4/98: Standards for the award of qualified teacher status: Annex A Department for Education and
Employment.
7
e.g. Wightman, Thelma, in collaboration with Peter Green and Phil Scott (1986) The Construction of Meaning and
Conceptual Change in Classroom Settings: Case Studies on the Particulate Nature of Matter, Leeds: Centre for Studies in
Science and Mathematics Education - Children’s learning in science project, February 1986.
8
Driver, Rosalind, Ann Squires, Peter Rushworth and Valerie Wood-Robinson (1994) Making Sense of Secondary
Science: research into children’s ideas, London: Routledge, 1994.
9
Taber, Keith S. (1998) An alternative conceptual framework from chemistry education, International Journal of Science
Education, 20 (5), pp.597-608.
10
Taber, K. S. (1999) The truth about ionisation energy: an instrument to diagnose common alternative conceptions,
School Science Review, 81 (295), pp.97-104.