Freshman university students' chemistry calculations skills: The effect of and students' major, task or calculation type
Abstract
The ability to solve chemistry calculation problems is a foundation for a number of chemical disciplines including laboratory activities within chemistry education (Srougi and Miller, 2018). In our previous research (Rusek, et al., 2021), we designed a chemistry calculation test and tested it on a smaller sample of university students.
In this study, students from the majority of the universities and faculties in Czechia offering chemistry teaching study programs were included. For comparison, chemistry-oriented students from the universities were included in the sample (Ntotal = 572, 31% of pre-service chemistry teachers (PCT)).
With slight alteration resulting from the last year's study, the same test was given to the students. Differences between students in chemistry and chemistry teaching oriented fields, between tasks-type (word-problems vs. formulae-based tasks) concerning: calculations of mass fraction, composition of solutions, pH, dilution problems and calculations from chemical equations were tested.
The tasks covered secondary chemistry curriculum, therefore, as they were assigned at the beginning of the semester, help to map the effect of secondary chemistry teaching. The results showed the groups of students were almost homogenous as far as their test-score was concerned.
There were two tasks PCTs significantly outperformed chemistry students and one on the contrary. Low values of effect-size (r < .2) suggest small effect.
The students solved the mass fraction tasks the best (68% success-rate), followed by tasks on composition of solutions (66%). In the other three calculation types, however, they failed significantly: calculations from chemical equations (20%), dilution problems (15%), pH calculations (10%).
As far as the task-type was concerned, only significant difference was found for composition of solutions calculations, however with a small effect-size (r = 0,069) in favor of formulae-based tasks. The results confirm previous findings about low effect of chemistry calculation education in upper-secondary schools suggesting several changes need to be made bot in upper-secondary schools - to lay appropriate foundations - as well as at university courses - to respond to the present state accordingly in an evidence-based manner to increase quality of education and even prevent students' drop outs.