Secondary school students' early choices related to staying in the science track define their future decisions to choose chemistry at college. This investigation aims at analyzing the role of gender in students' causal attributions to choose or abandon chemistry when it first becomes optional in the Spanish educational system. Our analyses…

Errors are natural elements of the learning process and provide a high potential to promote students' learning outcomes. In recent years, there has been much research about learning from errors. However, we know little about the relationship between students' error beliefs in chemistry and chemistry learning outcomes at present. Thus, the aim of…

Recent progress in elucidating chemical reactions allows to explain chemistry by the potential energy of the involved chemical structures. Nevertheless, from an educational point of view, empirical results indicate that students often do not connect the core idea of energy with other chemical concepts. From a resource-oriented perspective,…

Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers' knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of…

With the urgent goal of increasing student retention within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, STEM identity is highlighted as a powerful source of student persistence. Since chemistry is an important part of the STEM discipline, a growing body of research has focused on chemistry identity. However, we currently know…

This study investigated the effect of visual anthropomorphic stories on students' understanding of the particulate nature of matter and their level of anthropomorphic discourse. This study employed a quasi-experimental research design with pretest and posttest control groups. Science activities supported by visual anthropomorphic stories were…

The active participation of citizens in scientific research, through citizen science, has been proven successful. However, knowledge on the potential of citizen science within formal chemistry learning, at the conceptual and procedural levels, remains insufficiently explored. We developed a citizen science project -- PVC: Perceiving the Value of…

According to research findings from all over the world, textbooks play an important role for teachers in the choice of methods, content and educational goals. However, the open textbook market, where the state's influence is limited, results in a significant gap between the state (written) curriculum and actual classroom practice. To understand…

Although the chemical literature contains many studies of multimedia-based learning and teacher enthusiasm, there is a paucity of research on whether and to what extent teacher enthusiasm in video lectures affects students' learning, especially in chemistry. In this context, this mixed-method study used eye tracking and quantitative analysis to…

This work applies a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) framework to understand how the outcome of a high school laboratory task may be positively influenced without making changes to the hands-on practical task itself. Informed by cognitivism, novel practical instruction videos that were based on the same video but had different audio…

Inspired by existing literature indicating that reading literacy is significantly associated with scientific reasoning and chemistry conceptual understanding, this quasi-experimental study explored the effectiveness of reflective reading of scientific articles on student inquiry performance. A total of 134 10th graders from southern Taiwan were…

Attitudes towards learning chemistry have been little studied in secondary school students, especially regarding dimensions related to problem solving, the molecular atomic perspective of chemistry, and real-world connection of chemistry. In the present study, we first aimed to design and assess the psychometric properties of the attitude to…

Although there are numerous chemistry-related careers within the STEM fields, chemistry-related careers are not well regarded. High school is a critical time for developing students' career choices. Previous studies suggest that anxiety and identity may be predictors of career choice. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the…

Studies on students' motivation to learn Chemistry in developed countries are largely common in the literature. However, very few studies have been carried out with a view to investigating students' motivation to learn Chemistry in places like Latin America, and specifically in Brazil. The present study sought to translate the Chemistry Motivation…

Emphasizing stoichiometry appears to be a norm of introductory chemistry courses. In this longitudinal and mixed-methods study, we examined how the emphasis on stoichiometry in assessments of introductory chemistry impacted educational equity and student learning. Using quantitative methods, we identified mole and stoichiometric conversions as two…