What Are Key, Critical and Dynamic Points of Early Chemistry Education? The Experience from Czech Republic
Abstract
In the contribution we deal with the research project results focuses on the identification of key, critical and dynamic points of chemistry instruction on the lower secondary school level through building the cooperation environment between teachers and teachers' educators in Czech Republic. Methodology of research is based mainly on semi-structured interview with chemistry teachers (n = 40) identifying key, critical and dynamic points in the current curriculum.
All points are classifying from the view of (1) importance within the subject paradigm (setting the key points and relation to key concepts), (2) demandingness for learners by teacher's self-assessment of teaching process (identification of critical points) and (3) the current development of the subject (discussion about dynamic points of the curriculum). The obtained results present problems with cognition overload of the pupils and the necessity to improve the content, particularly to build stronger connection to everyday life and forming of science literacy.
The results tend to verify the expected critical fields of the early chemistry curriculum, i.e. mainly chemical calculations, chemical reactions, field of electro-chemistry, chemical nomenclature and professional communication. The results also show more attention should be paid to areas, in which chemistry teachers from the praxis can contribute substantially towards improvement of teacher's education and chemistry curriculum on their teaching level.
Next steps of the project are oriented to defining the methodological processes and strategies to teaching/learning elected critical and key points of the curriculum, including their optimization and verification by the action research of connected teachers.