Abstract:

Classroom teachers concern about poor performances of students in chemistry were well noted in research articles. There were literary evidences explaining the reason for poor performances in chemistry. One of the important reason pointed out by academicians was the presence of alternate concepts in the chemistry content areas.

Literature studies indicated a gap in studying the students’ misconceptions (alternate concepts) in the area of Periodic Table related contents. The Objective of this study was to identify possible misconceptions of high school students’ misconceptions in the contents related to periodic table.

As a member of the chemistry teaching community, we realised that there were certain content areas that might inhibit the learning of other contents if the specific area was not well understood by the students’. In many cases chemistry classroom teachers were forced to walk back in the content area in-order to assist themselves or just ignore the students’ difficulties which accumulate further alternate concepts and make learners’ underperformers.

According to our observation there existed a solution that could help us to overcome the current challenges that we expressed above. We needed to identify a specific topic that has its influence over many other topics in the field of chemistry learning. Then identify students’ common alternate concepts or knowledge gap that were arising out of existing teaching-learning process. After the identification of students’ knowledge gaps, encourage chemistry teachers to be specific in handling those gaps while delivering the lesson.
We on our side identified periodic table (PT) as one of such topic that might hinder the learning of atoms and related topics.
It was hence decided that we identify the common alternate concepts of students in the content area of PT.

A non-interventional post study quantitative study method was adopted for the study. A standardised tool was used to collect data on different content areas related to the periodic table and atoms.

A standardised tool containing questions on PT was administered to students from different grades (10 & 11). These included 80 grade eleven students from two different schools and 39 grade ten students.

Several alternate concepts were identified and reported as a finding of the study.

We observed a knowledge gap in students understanding the properties of the periodic table along with certain knowledge gap in content areas.

We suggested that while delivering the lesson on PT, chemistry teachers at high schools should deliberate themselves to clear up the identified misconceptions that were mostly found to be present in learners mind.

Keywords:

Alterative conceptions, periodic table, teaching