The international dimension of Chemistry Education Research and Practice

Chemistry Education Research and Practice has recently added the expertise of two new Editorial Board members to support the work of the journal. Dr David J. McGarvey, from Keele Univeristy (UK), is primarily a physical chemist (although some of his work concerns biological systems) who has strong interests in developing laboratory teaching at undergraduate level. Kim Chwee (Daniel) Tan is Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education, part of Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), works as a chemistry teacher educator, and has undertaken a range of studies into teaching and learning chemistry at secondary level.

The addition of Daniel Tan to the editorial board not only recognises his own work in the field, but also reminds us that Chemistry Education is very much an international activity. Whilst Chemistry Education Research and Practice is supported by an advisory board drawing on expertise from many parts of the world, our Editorial Board previously had a strong Europe–North America bias that better reflected logistics of conferring, than the international nature of chemistry education as a field.

That international flavour is reflected quite strongly in the present issue. There are two papers from the USA, both looking at aspects of pedagogy: one looking at lecture demonstrations and the other at how students made sense of computer animations intended to depict a redox process. There are also two papers from Turkey, again broadly concerned with pedagogy: one exploring teaching with visual media tools, and the other exploring the use of an argument-based inquiry approach to support learning. One of two papers from the UK explores how cognitive factors influence problem-solving, whilst the other considers how skills that can be developed during school level chemistry can ease the transfer to university level study. A study from South Africa considers student difficulties in learning about representation in chemistry; a paper from Sweden considers learning in an area of biochemistry; and a paper from Estonia looks at how context-based learning can influence student motivation. A contribution from Greece explores why people might decide to pursue chemistry-related careers, whilst a paper from Israel considers teaching of nano-scale science at secondary level. It is also good to see that the Journal's strong tradition of representing work at both school and university level continues to be reflected in both submissions, and the selection of manuscripts that referees see fit to recommend for publication.

The complex nature of teaching and learning chemistry

As well as being drawn from eight national contexts, there is clearly quite a diverse range of research foci represented: learners and teaching; cognitive and affective factors; concern with particular concept areas within chemistry, and with more general skills related to the work of chemists. Although the contents of one issue of the journal can hardly be considered to represent the field of chemistry education, this set of papers offers an example of both the breadth and current vibrancy of the field. Teaching and learning are complex activities: and chemistry education researchers are finding a wide range of productive foci to explore in seeking to develop the knowledge base that can support effective chemistry education. That complexity is also a strong challenge for anyone hoping to generate any kind of generalised knowledge about what makes for effective chemistry teaching.

The eight national contexts from which the current issue is drawn are of course not the only places where chemistry educators are active in research and innovative practice. Restricting consideration to the present volume (Volume 13) we also find contributions from authors from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Malaysia, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. This breadth is to be welcomed, although it is noticeable that quite a number of published papers derive from one nation (USA), and that aside, European nations (especially if we consider Turkey and Israel as part of Europe) seem to be well represented when compared with, for example, Africa, Latin America or Asia. Chemistry Education Research and Practice is an international journal open to contributions from anywhere in the world, and it will be interesting to see how the ‘international profile’ of articles published in the journal develops over time. Turkey offers an example of a country that has relatively quickly become a major contributor to chemistry education and indeed science education more widely.

Challenges to an international field of scholarship

However, being an international journal raises some interesting issues. One of these concerns the varied terminology and customs adopted in different parts of the world that may be so familiar to authors that they do not realise that they are not universally shared. So grade levels need not mean precisely the same age learners in different contexts – and it may not be clear what different authors actually intend to mean when referring to middle school or junior high school students unless they specify the ages concerned. Terms like sophomore, or references to ‘sections’ within an undergraduate cohort may be specific to certain localities. Even references to ‘college students’ may not be clear: does this refer to pre-university students (usually in the UK for example), or undergraduates (as often seems the intention in the USA)? These are issues that can be readily solved if authors are careful to consider which of the terms they habitually use may mean little to an international readership; or if referees identify possible ambiguities when reviewing submitted manuscripts and require clarifications to be included in a revised manuscript.

A more nuanced and substantive issue concerns the relationship between national (or regional) context and the significance of research. A key feature of the material published in research journals is that it is judged to offer some originality. Yet like any other contended notion, ‘originality’ is in the eye, or at least the mind, of the beholder. A study that has already been published is not eligible for republication (in the same or another journal). But what about a study that is very similar to what has already been published?

Replication and educational studies

One issue here is the value of replication. Supposedly in science – and I consider chemistry education research to be part of science, as broadly envisaged (Taber, 2009) – research should be published with sufficient details of research design to allow replication, so that other researchers can confirm results. The importance of replication studies in science education is recognised (Duit and Treagust, 2012), yet studies that simply replicate existing studies may not be readily accepted for publication.

Moreover, in educational work the very notion of replication becomes problematic. Learners change as they learn. Curriculum and other structural constraints and accordances of teaching shift. Culture moves on – and with it potential influences on learners’ ideas, values and interests. Each teacher is unique. Each student is unique. Each class is unique. Each school is unique. And so on. In absolute terms, we never have precise replication – and we can only consider studies as being straight replications by ignoring many of the differences that we know are important for what particular learners will actually learn in particular classes.

Of course, some research approaches have tools to respond to such challenges (representatives samples, large sample sizes, operationally defined constructs, inferential statistics), whilst others forms of research eschew statistical generalisation to focus instead on the kinds of detail of educational processes in particular cases that may often be pertinent in those individual cases, but must necessarily be seen as noise in the more ‘nomothetic’ studies (Gilbert and Watts, 1983). My own take on this is that given the inherent limitations of either form of research, progress will usually rely upon complementary studies: some working in sufficient detail to identify important features of individual cases, and others then looking to test out the potential significance of those features across wider contexts (Biddle and Anderson, 1986).

The question of what is meant by a replication study is of particular relevance to making editorial decisions in international journals. Given the differences between different educational contexts, it is clear that we cannot assume that what is found in one setting will automatically apply elsewhere. So it is obvious that we would not assume that learning difficulties found among 11 year-olds first meeting particle models of matter would also apply to post-graduate students. That does not mean we should always assume that graduates will have necessarily ‘overcome’ alternative conceptions demonstrated by school children either – for example Coll and Treagust’s (2003) work suggests that university students, including post-graduates, may well continue to think about some chemical concepts in ways that seem sub-optimal even at secondary level – but rather we should consider that it remains an empirical question whether common ways of thinking (for example) identified in a particular teaching and learning context are also to be found in quite different educational contexts.

Chemistry learning and cultural differences

This is perhaps obvious when we consider very different age groups, but the same question can be asked about students of similar ages studying in different national contexts. It is tempting to think that chemistry is the same the world over, so it is likely that students will struggle with the same concepts, and form pretty much the same alternative conceptions. To some extent this is certainly found to be so (Taber et al., 2012; Tan et al., 2008), but there are differences between different educational contexts that we might believe to have potential to be significant. We might expect that such issues as the age at which topics are first taught, the depth of coverage, and the sequencing of topics; as well as matters such as class size, the amount and type of laboratory work, the teaching approach (‘traditional’ teacher-led exposition; open-ended enquiry; use of familiar contexts to introduce concepts); the availability of textbooks and technological aids, etc., could all influence learning. (If not, then a great deal of time and effort spent researching, debating, and advocating changes in such areas would seem rather academic.) Moreover issues such as the language of instruction, presentations of science in the local media, and the way chemistry is seen within the culture, and so forth, may also have a part to play.

When is a replication study original?

This leads to a question that will sometimes vex an editor. Should an otherwise competent study be considered original enough to publish if it seems to repeat existing published work, where findings are well known and generally considered uncontroversial, but in a different national context? One possible response is that it is worth publishing if the findings are sufficiently different from those of the original study…but a little thought suggests that this is a rather illogical approach. After all, if we accept that finding something different in a different context is worth knowing about (so we accept that there could be potentially different outcomes in different institutional and cultural contexts) then is it not just as informative to know when findings are duplicated elsewhere, as when they are not?

My own take is that this question of sufficient originality depends upon the conceptual framework within which a study has been developed. If a paper simply repeats work from elsewhere for no better reason than the original authors thought it was worth doing the original study, then a replication of the original findings is unlikely to add much to the shared knowledge of the research community. On the other hand, if part of the motivation for the study is a clear and well-developed argument for why there might be a question of whether the difference in context between the original research and new study would make a difference (for why the different sequencing of topics, or language of instruction, of some aspect of the national culture, etc., might be expected to impinge on learning), then we have authentic research question for which findings that ‘replicate’ the original study may be just as noteworthy as findings that demonstrate outcomes are different in the new research context.

In such circumstances the ‘replication’ is clearly extending our understanding and not just repeating earlier work, and it might well be considered to deserve its place in the international research literature. Indeed, given the wide range of factors that can impinge upon learning, and the inherent difficulties in setting up educational experiments that can effectively isolate and control such factors, there might be a strong case for encouraging more cross-national ‘replication’ studies (Taber, 2012), provided they can be designed to take advantage of some of the range of differences commonly found in teaching and learning chemistry in different parts of the world. Such ‘natural experiments’ are unlikely to be able to offer entirely ‘fair’ comparisons but they can at least offer insights into some of the many diverse factors that influence the learning of chemistry. Given the variety of teaching and learning contexts found worldwide, there is considerable scope here for research in some of the national contexts not currently well represented in Chemistry Education Research and Practice. Perhaps we can look forward to reading research from an even wider range of countries in future volumes of the journal.

References

1. Biddle B. J. and Anderson D. S., (1986), Theory, methods, knowledge and research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (3rd ed., pp. 230–252). New York: Macmillan.
2. Coll R. K. and Treagust D. F., (2003). Investigation of Secondary School, Undergraduate, and Graduate Learners’ Mental Models of Ionic Bonding. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 40(5), 464–486.
3. Duit R. and Treagust D. F., (2012), How can conceptual change contribute to theory and practice in science education? In B. J. Fraser, K. G. Tobin and C. J. MacRobbie (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Science Education (pp. 108–118). Dordrecht: Springer.
4. Gilbert J. K. and Watts D. M., (1983). Concepts, misconceptions and alternative conceptions: changing perspectives in science education. Studies in Science Education, 10, 61–98.
5. Taber K. S., (2009), Progressing Science Education: Constructing the scientific research programme into the contingent nature of learning science. Dordrecht: Springer.
6. Taber K. S., (2012), Vive la différence? Comparing ‘like with like’ in studies of learners’ ideas in diverse educational contexts. Educational Research International, 2012 (Article 168741), 1–12. Retrieved from http://www.hindawi.com/journals/edu/2012/168741/. DOI:10.1155/2012/168741.
7. Taber K. S., Tsaparlis G. and Nakiboğlu C., (2012), Student Conceptions of Ionic Bonding: Patterns of thinking across three European contexts. International Journal of Science Education, 1–31.
8. Tan K.-C. D., Taber K. S., Liu X., Coll R. K., Lorenzo M. and Li J., et al. (2008), Students’ conceptions of ionisation energy: A cross-cultural study. International Journal of Science Education, 30(2), 263–283.

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