Description
Acid-base chemistry plays an important role in our lives because of its real-world applications (industrial processes including acid-base reactions, everyday products containing or consisting of acidic or basic compounds, …). Consequentially, the topic is an important one in chemistry education. However, in the classroom, historical acid-base concepts clash with modern-day applicability, as their history is chiefly characterised by contradictory discoveries. Therefore, designation of what is an acid or a base remains ambiguous; everyday language, historical concepts and modern concepts of acid-base reactions lead to inconsistencies in teaching and model confusion amongst the learners. In order to relate the macroscopic everyday experiences of the learners to acid-base reactions with the processes on the submicroscopic level and to better embed acid-base reactions into the concept of chemical reactions in general, the Brønsted-Lowry acid-base concept was adapted accordingly for upper secondary students in the Design-Based Research project presented here. The focus in the adaptation is on the compatibility of acid-base reactions to other donor-acceptor reaction types (e.g. redox reactions). By means of Educational Reconstruction, key ideas (KIs) were identified as the central aspects of the topic for the target group. An explanatory framework based on the aforementioned key ideas was presented to upper secondary school students so as to evaluate acceptance, plausibility and applicability in three rounds of interviews employing the method of probing acceptance (N1=7, N2=4, N3=7). The results of these assessments were then used to design a teaching-learning sequence (TLS), which was evaluated using Rasch-scaled acid-base knowledge testing in an intervention study (N4=52). Overall, the results from both the preliminary investigations and the intervention study demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of the chosen approach for local upper secondary students and thus contribute to the literature of how to teach about acid-base reactions.| Period | 28 Aug 2023 |
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| Event title | ESERA 2023 Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cappadocia, TurkeyShow on map |