Preface

This volume in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Advances in Chemistry Education series considers the core topic of pedagogy in chemistry – the science of teaching chemistry. ‘Science’, that is, as the guidance here is based on argument from theory and empirical research. I discuss a good many research studies in the book – some from school contexts, some from university contexts. However, for reasons discussed in the text, the potential to produce generalised principles approaching the status of a scientific law is very limited when dealing with the inherent diversity of such phenomena as learners, teachers, classrooms, lessons and courses of study: phenomena we find embedded in a wide range of different institutional and cultural contexts rather than carefully isolated in laboratory settings. This makes educational ‘science’ much more messy and fuzzy than chemical science. That does not mean research cannot offer useful guidance to teachers – just that we have to keep in mind that whereas chemical research tells us what will happen under certain controlled conditions, educational research can usually only tell us what did happen under conditions that were perhaps somewhat like those we are teaching in.

This book offers a general account of pedagogies for teaching chemistry that is not specific to a particular level. The general principles discussed here are equally applicable (‘in principle’) when teaching young children or post-graduates – though clearly that does not mean there are no substantive differences in teaching different groups. A factor that is strictly always relevant may be quite critical at one level and much less important at another. Chemistry teachers should be used to responding to such issues. For example, technically, all chemical reactions are equilibria, but we know that sometimes the equilibrium is critical, whereas there are many combinations of reactions and conditions that we can unproblematically treat as if they go to completion (or do not proceed at all). Every chemical change can be considered in terms of enthalpy and entropy changes – but when considering a particular reaction under particular conditions, we may only need to be concerned with the enthalpy change or the entropy change. A similar mentality open to considering how principles apply in particular circumstances is useful for learning from chemistry education research (‘CER’) studies.

My imagined readership, then, is teachers of chemistry and those (who may or may not be the same people) researching into chemistry teaching. I am aware that many, but not all, teachers of chemistry are chemistry graduates; that some, but not all, have formal teaching qualifications (or are working towards them); and that some, but not all, already engage with the CER literature. I am also aware that readers will be of very different levels of teaching experience, teaching at different levels and across different ranges of topics (or even academic subjects). In preparing the manuscript, I tried to follow the advice I gave in it: that is, not to make too many assumptions about what readers will already know. Some readers will likely therefore find some rather obvious things spelt out, and I trust in those cases you will recognise that some other readers may appreciate this level of treatment. I am assuming all my readers are however sufficiently ‘metacognitively sophisticated’ to treat the book as a resource where parts can be read closely when this seems indicated, but which can be skimmed through when that seems more appropriate.

I hoped to write a volume that both set out the major ideas underpinning pedagogy as well as surveying the various teaching approaches and techniques that have been developed, which would be presented in a logical order. The sheer scale of the literature available makes an author wary of claiming a comprehensive account of the topic. The book ended up longer than I had initially intended, but could easily have been extended considerably. Many of the approaches and techniques I discuss could arguably justify their own volumes.

Organising the material into logical divisions and then finding an optimum sequence proved challenging. There are clearly alternative options to the structure I eventually settled on. I think there is a logic to the themes I have collected together into chapters and to the overall sequencing of the material. However, I have included a good deal of internal cross-referencing. In part, this is because the later chapters discuss approaches and techniques that have their rationale in ideas discussed earlier in the book. However, it is also in the nature of the subject matter that there are considerable overlaps between nominally different pedagogies, and terminology is not always used consistently across the teaching community. I hope the many references to ‘see Chapter X…’ will prove useful, especially where readers are not working through the whole volume in chapter order; but clearly these can be ignored when they are not helpful to the reader. On the other hand, I have briefly reiterated basic notions where needed for addressing new topics, so that the reader will not need to constantly be referring back. This involves some degree of repetition of key ideas for anyone reading the whole volume, but I hope makes for a ‘smoother’ reading experience (as well as reflecting the importance of reinforcement of core ideas stressed in the book).

I refer to a good many research studies in the book, but still only a tiny fraction of the research that has been published. Individual studies have to be read with provisos and caveats. Given the challenges involved in both undertaking research in teaching and learning contexts and generalising across diverse contexts, the findings of research undertaken ‘elsewhere’ should generally not be assumed to apply ‘here’ but should rather be seen as suggesting what is worth testing ‘here’. I have tried to infuse the volume with a sense both that research can offer useful indications and guidance for teachers, by suggesting what is likely to be productive if instigated ‘here’; but also that we only find out for sure what happens here by trying it out here. The literature offers us hypotheses for what could improve our teaching practice – and when studies are reported in sufficient detail they allow us to get a strong feel for when such hypotheses are worth testing in our local context. Although this book is intended to offer a scholarly account of the field rather than be a handbook on how to teach chemistry, I have tried to include sufficient detail and exemplification to support readers who do wish to try out ideas for themselves in their own classrooms.

Keith S. Taber, Cambridgeshire, England