Course Overview
Course Description
In this blended course, pre-service chemistry teachers will actively discuss and reflect upon common chemistry misconceptions and develop strategies to overcome these misconceptions.
Depending on your experiences with teaching chemistry, you may have noticed that misconceptions about chemistry foundations often hinder the learning of more complex concepts.
You will explore a variety of social learning and constructivist theories as tools to engage in active learning, scientific literacy, and science communication. These strategies will help identify preconceptions that students have and consequently how these misconceptions can be eliminated.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Define "misconception"
- Identify a variety of chemistry misconceptions and their impact on learning new concepts
- Apply a variety of active and constructivist learning strategies to eliminate chemistry misconceptions
- Design tools and lessons to target common chemistry misconceptions
- Critique the effectiveness and usability of tools and lessons in a real classroom
Course Structure
This 12 week course is divided into three modules. Each of these modules build upon each other and will lead to a lesson and reflection.
Each module is organized so that it has pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities. Pre- and post-class activities will be completed in Canvas while in-class activities are done in our face-to-face classes. It is expected that you complete the pre-class activities as they will inform our in-class discussions and activities. The post-class activities are done to consolidate your learning. You have been divided into post-class groups and can submit a group response to these activities. Since you all have different interests, each post-class activity will come with an option.