Research project - what's so hard about Chemistry?

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As a student in my final year studying Education and Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, I’m currently undertaking a research project investigating the assumptions we make when learning and explaining Chemistry. As part of the INSTRUCT Research Group, we’re hoping the work will help us understand why Chemistry can be one of the most difficult subjects for students at school.

In order to do this, we’re looking for students aged 16-18 who are studying any sciences at AS/A Level standard to complete our online survey. It should take around 20 minutes to complete, and students can win a £25 Amazon voucher! Students will be presented with chemical scenarios and then asked to answer questions based on the situation described. They will also be asked some demographic questions, but the survey is entirely anonymous.

The outcome of this research project will hopefully lead on to further work investigating why students struggle so much with Chemistry. So I’d like to encourage teachers to pass the survey on to their AS/A Level classes and ask students to complete it in their own time, if there’s no time in class. I’ll be blogging here as the project progresses and hopefully the conclusions will be of interest to you all!

Our survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KQCDYGT

If you’d like more information about our research group, our website is here.

Posted by Elizabeth McLoughlin on Dec 13, 2012 8:51 PM Europe/London

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David ashworth

Date Posted: Dec 18, 2012 at 11:26 AM

As an A2 student I personally feel that the porblems people face with learning chemistry is the lack of detail within GCSE, even in triple award there is very little detail. For example electron spins, at Gcse we are told to learn that the first shell has 2 and the rest have 8, where in reality this is only correct for the S orbital. 1S2, 2S2 etc... Once the initial hurdles of AS are covered, though simple there is not enough foundations for students to grasp more difficult concepts. I myself still struggle with one topic, Hess law the abstract nature of this confuses me a precise and consistent method of learning this is needed (having 3 different teacher) I have seen a variety of methods. Non of which I can fully remember/Grasp.

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Ian Miller

Date Posted: Dec 15, 2012 at 2:06 AM

My guess is that chemistry involves some rather abstract concepts, and if these are not properly understood early, the student merely finds everything bewildering. A second problem is that even when these concepts are understood, what follows is a bewildering amount of information in which only the more clever can even find approximate unifying principles. Really good teachers can overcome these problems, but usually it is the student that has to do it for him/herself.

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