Examining factors that can impact conceptual learning in first-year cegep chemistry

Knowledge consists of interrelated concepts that encompass truths, information, and principles that enable a person to construct meaning about the world in a unique way. Learning is a complex, cumulative process by which students add new pieces of information by interpreting them from the vantage point of their preexisting ideas and beliefs. Addressing students’ misconceptions in science courses at all levels of instruction has become a major concern for science educators since incomplete, faulty concepts are major hurdles for attaining future effective learning. This exploratory study has multiple goals: It aims to identify misconceptions in chemistry held by first-semester CEGEP students, to investigate how instruction can influence their conceptual learning, and to analyze if gender and language of instruction in high school are significant predictors of conceptual gains. To identify misconceptions in chemistry and investigate how instruction can influence conceptual learning, 332 first-semester CEGEP Science students in an Anglophone college in Montreal (male:female ratio = 0.83) who were divided in 11 cohorts took the Chemistry Concept Inventory (CCI), a well-researched instrument that contains 22 multiple-choice conceptual questions that test students’ knowledge about basic high-school level material. The CCI was administered twice: as a pretest (before receiving instruction) to detect misconceptions brought from high school and as a posttest (after instruction) to provide information about the changes resulting from instruction. The case-study design involved a treatment group and 10 control groups, which were taught the same material by different instructors. The independent variable was the learning activity, which is either a series of computer simulations that provided visualization of chemical phenomena to students (the treatment), or traditional lecture format for the delivery of the material (the control). The treatment involved three computer simulations that were carried out by groups of students in class. These simulations are available on the website of the Phet Interactive Simulations from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Hake normalized learning gain, based on the differences between pre- and posttest scores, was calculated for each student and for each cohort. The mean of this gain for the whole sample was 6.1%, and the treatment group had the highest gain, 12.1%. The pretest score is a significant predictor (R2adjusted = 0.562, F(7,324) = 61.73, p < 0.01) of posttest score, which indicates that students who already knew chemistry concepts at the beginning of the course did better than those holding multiple misconceptions. No statistically significant difference was observed between test scores and the language of instruction in high school. Although neither the cohort nor the treatment was a significant predictor of posttest scores, the results indicate a gender gap in which the treatment is significant for males (R2adjusted = 0.497, F(5,145) = 30.65, p = 0.00685) but not significant for females. This means that males benefit from the treatment significantly more than females do. One-way ANOVA showed gender as a significant predictor of scores in most of the items in both pretest (14 of 22 questions, F(1, 330) = 5.19, MSE = 0.25, p < 0.024) and posttest (19 of 22 questions, F(1, 330) = 8.42, MSE = 0.25, p < 0.004) with males outperforming females. The combined data indicate the existence of a gender gap in introductory college chemistry, a feature that was not reported in previous studies with the CCI. The comparison between the misconceptions held by first-year CEGEP students with those reported for American first-year undergraduates enabled the identification of the most challenging concepts for which measured learning gains were either negligible or not observed. This study indicates that concepts dealing with the microscopic scale and size of atoms, the distinction between the physical and chemical properties of aggregate matter compared to the properties of its molecular constituents, as well as the energy changes in the formation and breaking of chemical bonds are among the most challenging concepts detected with the CCI. The results emphasize the difficulties faced by learners related to the triplet representation in chemistry whose understanding requires the distinction between the particulate model used to describe matter, the understanding of chemical and physical properties displayed in laboratory experiments, and the symbolic representations used to describe phenomena. The trends reported extensively for American undergraduate students regarding the types of identified misconceptions and the magnitude of the normalized learning gains align with those found in this study, which indicates the validity of the CCI as a tool to analyze conceptual learning under the specific characteristics of Quebec’s CEGEP system. The crafting of lesson plans that engage learners in the transfer of key concepts and ideas to new settings is paramount to helping them learn chemistry more effectively by selecting an appropriate model in each specific context. This study sheds light on critical issues related to curriculum development by attempting to map the conceptual landscape of first-year CEGEP students and by analyzing the effect of instruction in learning gains. The indication that classroom practices based on computer simulations might be beneficial for enhancing conceptual learning deserves further investigation. The findings of this study can be used to guide fruitful pedagogical discussions among chemistry teachers who are interested in aligning students’ pre-knowledge, instruction, curriculum, and assessment.

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