Abstract
The ability to note down a course of chemical reaction, balance the formula and use it in chemical calculations belongs among chemists' basic skills. Yet, research showed serious inadequacies in these students' skills.
Moreover, balancing chemical formulas teaching bears only limited fruit and also demotivates students. A question whether to include such topic in lower- and upper-secondary chemistry basic courses suggest itself.
This study was therefore planned to bring more insight and arguments in this field. Based on a chemical calculations and general chemistry conception tests, 11 freshman students were chosen.
Eye-tracking, retrospective think-aloud and interviews were used to map their performance on another chemistry concept pre-test and a set of six chemical equations. The students' success is mostly not determined by their chemistry concepts knowledge.
The students did not reflect the sub-microscopic representations and merely solved mathematical problems with chemical symbols. From upper-secondary school chemistry, they carried a prefabricated set of steps how to crack chemistry equations without actually being able to consider the corresponding particles' interactions.
In addition, they are mostly trained only in balancing inorganic chemistry formulas. The findings suggest this topic needs extra attention and its teaching needs to be reconsidered to provide intended goals as well as make more sense from the scientific point of view.