Series Introduction

The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Advances in Chemistry Education series comprises scholarly volumes prepared to support the work of chemical educators at all levels. Chemistry Education Research (CER) has become a recognised specialised field of research (Gilbert et al., 2002) concerned with the teaching and learning of chemistry, and there is now an extensive literature in this field. The Advances in Chemistry Education series offers titles that report on important themes from the field, offering up-to-date accounts of the major ideas and research findings. It is anticipated that the series volumes will prove invaluable both for researchers and advanced students looking for authoritative introductions to topics in the field and for teachers (and teachers-in-preparation) seeking guidance on current best practices in teaching chemistry.

Chemical subject knowledge is critical to effective chemistry teaching: but it should be seen as necessary, yet not sufficient. Effective teachers also have extensive knowledge of their students, curricular models (where suitability depends on the level of study), the characteristics of human learning, pedagogical approaches and techniques, suitable teaching and learning resources and so much more. Moreover, just as a specialist in any other field within the discipline of chemistry acquires expert knowledge based on that specialism built upon a broader background of chemical knowledge, the chemistry teacher develops a specialist kind of ‘chemical knowledge for teaching’ that is not an alternative to canonical chemical knowledge but is a perspective on it, recognising how it best needs to be presented in teaching if it is to be meaningfully understood at a certain educational level (Taber, 2020).

Many of the principles drawn upon in understanding teaching and learning are common across multiple curriculum areas, and certainly, much research carried out in the wider field of science education research can be applied to chemistry teaching. However, even when more broadly applicable principles are pertinent in chemistry education, there are specifics of the subject matter that become important for their effective application – so there is much value in scholarship to explore how these ideas relate to, and are best applied in, chemistry teaching and learning. CER is therefore more than just educational research that happens to have been carried out in the context of chemistry lessons or courses: it is research that is motivated by what is special about chemistry education. Sometimes this relates to concerns that are particular to the subject (such as the way chemistry teaching commonly involves shifts between macroscopic and molecular levels of description and explanation), and sometimes, there is a focus on how general educational principles can be best understood and applied in the specifics of teaching and learning chemical subject matter (Taber, 2013). Volumes in the Advances in Chemistry Education series draw upon pertinent perspectives and research findings including those arising outside of the CER field, but have a particular focus on relevance for, and application in, the chemistry classroom.

CER has an interesting locus within academia, in part sitting within chemistry itself, but also being part of the social science of educational research. The subject matter that is the ‘content’ of chemistry teaching is drawn from within natural science, but the research knowledge and skills necessary to undertake empirical studies into chemistry teaching and learning are often quite different from those applied in the chemical research laboratory. As with any scientific enterprise, CER has to adopt and develop instrumentation, techniques and perspectives that are appropriate to its particular specialist focus. Whereas the focus in chemistry classes is chemical knowledge drawn from studying nature, the core foci of CER relate to the very human activities of teaching and studying. Techniques are needed to explore, inter alia,

• teacher and learner thinking,

• processes of curriculum design and lesson planning,

• the way chemical knowledge is represented in teaching,

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    and how this is then understood by learners

• the types of activities and resources used to support (and assess) learners of chemistry

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    and how these are engaged with by those learners,

• the nature of classroom interactions between teachers and learners

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    and the conditions when these best support learning…

Like any active research field, CER has accumulated a vast number of studies. A good number of these are published in the journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice or the research section of the Journal of Chemical Education. But many others are spread across regional or national chemistry education publications; published in science education journals, or even more general education journals, as well as various books and conference proceedings. There is too much material for even a CER specialist to keep on top of it all, and it is unreasonable to expect chemistry teachers to be aware of all the research that is relevant to their professional work. Indeed, as in any other field, the iterative accumulation of research as well as the occasional challenges to earlier studies leads to a constantly shifting state of knowledge and understanding. Just as in chemistry itself, perfectly sound studies that made a useful contribution at the time of publication may in time become less helpful for informing best practice.

This is where the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Advances in Chemistry Education series can best support the community. There is a genre of specialist writing that falls between the primary literature where vast numbers of distinct studies are published, and the textbooks that offer students introductions to a field. This genre includes handbook chapters and review articles that are aimed at a professional audience, but seek to set out a coherent account of some aspect of a research field as it may best be understood at that time – that is, ‘the state of’ the sub-field or research programme. Preparing this kind of literature is more than a technical task of identifying and summarising relevant literature, but rather needs authors able to offer an authoritative perspective, identify key ideas and impose a coherent and accessible narrative across a complex topic. The Advances in Chemistry Education volumes are intended to offer scholarly accounts of important topics of significance to those working in chemistry education – perspectives on the ‘state of the art’ that engage with the research literature but are accessible to those such as classroom teachers and graduate students looking for authoritative introductions to inform their own work.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (and its precursor the Chemical Society, formed in 1841) has a long tradition of publishing book series in areas of chemistry that offer specialist overviews of current thinking in topics of interest for the professional chemist. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Advances in Chemistry Education series provides that service for professional chemists who are teachers per se or for those who teach chemistry as part of their role. The books are scholarly contributions that are intended to be up-to-date summaries that will be useful for researchers and research students, but (given the ultimate purpose of educational research is to inform effective educational practices) written to be accessible to all practitioners teaching chemistry.

The series includes both authored volumes and edited collections that include contributions from a range of authors. The editors and authors are drawn from the international community, and the volumes will be of broad interest to chemistry educators wherever they may be working. The series is open-ended in the sense that it is intended to continue to add new volumes over time to ensure that the series can support the chemistry education community in engaging with developments in the CER field.

Keith S. Taber