Study of students' mental images effect on learning chemistry

Abstract

It is clear that use of images has effect on teaching the chemistry concepts. In classrooms, some examples which are used for simplifying and understanding the material better are in macroscopic dimension and students do not understand particles such as atoms, molecules and ions well. In order to help them understand these concepts in macroscopic dimension, illustration is used. In illustration, students can reflect different concepts of chemistry which have learnt during teaching. One of the illustration methods is to use painting art, as one can determine the extent to which they have understood from chemistry concepts and relationship among different areas of the sciences, society and technology by studying paintings of these students. The Aim of this research is to determine through their paintings whether students have understood the taught concepts in chemistry of the first grade of high school in IRAN or not. These chemistry subjects include water, atmosphere, minerals and fuel. After teaching the above topics, the students were asked to select a subject at their will and paint about it. This research has been performed in two separate cities in IRAN but it has been implemented in equal age groups and it was specified that different places of residence had effects on selection of painting subject. Our experience showed that use of this method led to deep learning in the students and provided the opportunity for them to express their beliefs in scientific concepts in their own way and language. On the other hand, teacher performs a kind of continual evaluation in this way and understands students’ misconceptions and tries to remove these errors before beginning new subject. This method is interesting for students so that most of them mentioned that painting the chemistry was new and interesting experience.