Science & Mathematics

While Christian communities had no problem engaging positively with the sciences of astronomy, physics and chemistry, they had difficulty engaging with the emerging geology and biology of the 19^th century. The ancient earth and evolutionary models of geology and biology respectively were seen as a direct attack on the biblical Genesis model of a young earth and a creation that took place over the period of a week. Some Christian apologists used Baconianism and the Scottish Common Sense philosophy to suggest that geology was not a real science. Geology was characterised as consisting of wild speculation, hypotheses and theories and lacking in solid factual evidence. In both Britain and North America Christian respondents to the new geology were classified as harmonizing geologists or scriptural geologists. This paper considers the nature of these respondents, their philosophical positions, and how these positions took form in the succeeding centuries in terms of different cognitive geological styles. The implications for the science education and science in society context will be discussed.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Svante Arrhenius and Henry Armstrong understood the dissolution process of salts in water quite differently. Arrhenius saw the dissolution process as one whereby the salt partially dissociated into its ions and Armstrong saw the dissolution process as one whereby the salt associated itself with water. History is somewhat kinder to Arrhenius than it is to Armstrong in that Arrhenius won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903 for his electrolytic dissociation theory whereas Armstrong was considered of a 'hot air balloon' who made it his business to oppose every new thought in chemistry. In the 1920s Arrhenius' view of partial dissociation was replaced by a view of total dissociation for strong electrolytes with activity and osmotic coefficients being used to account for non-ideal solution behaviour. However, recent research has shown that strong 1:1 electrolytes are best understood by using Arrhenius' original idea of partial dissociation rather than total dissociation and Armstrong's idea of hydration. This strange confluence of factors has important implications for chemical epistemology and its role in chemistry education.

This is a book which will appeal to historians, philosophers, chemists, and educators. Of the ninety-two elements up to uranium only seven were missing from the periodic table around 1913. The story surrounding the identification of these seven elements forms the core material of the book.

Both Lavoisier and Priestley were committed to the role of experiment and observation in their chemistry practice. According to Lavoisier the physical sciences embody three important ingredients; facts, ideas, and language, and Priestley would not have disagreed with this. Ideas had to be consistent with the facts generated from experiment and observation and language needed to be precise and reflect the known chemistry of substances. While Priestley was comfortable with a moderate amount of hypothesis making, Lavoisier had no time for what he termed theoretical speculation about the fundamental nature of matter and avoided the use of the atomic hypothesis and Aristotle’s elements in his Elements of Chemistry. In the preface to this famous work he claims he has good educational reasons for this position. While Priestley and Lavoisier used similar kinds of apparatus in their chemistry practice, they came to their task with completely different worldviews as regards the nature of chemical reactivity. This paper examines these worldviews as practiced in the famous experiment on the composition of air and the implications of this for chemistry education are considered.

Physical Chemistry's birth was fraught with controversy, a controversy about electrolyte solution chemistry which has much to say about how scientific knowledge originates, matures, and responds to challenges. This has direct implications for the way our students are educated in physical chemistry in particular and science in general. The incursion of physical measurement and mathematics into a discipline which had been largely defined within a laboratory of smells, bangs, and colours was equivalent to the admission into chemistry of the worship of false gods according to one chemist. The controversy can be classified as a battle between dissociationists on the one hand and associationists on the other; between the Europeans on the one hand and the British on the other; between the ionists on the one hand and the hydrationists on the other. Such strong contrasts set the ideal atmosphere for the development of argumentation skills. The fact that a compromise position, first elaborated in the late 19th century, has recently enhanced the explanatory capacity for electrolyte solution chemistry is challenging but one in which students can participate to their benefit.

To those of us who are sold on history it may seem non-controversial to suggest that the learning and teaching of chemistry should give cognisance to the historical development of the subject. However, this suggestion is proving controversial amongst some in the chemistry profession. For example, in the October 2010 edition of Chemistry in Australia Rami Ibo takes issue with the emphasis on the history of science in the HSC chemistry curriculum (Year 12) in New South Wales. He studied chemistry, physics and biology for his HSC in NSW and concluded that, because the primary focus of these three sciences was History of Science, “There was hardly any content that challenged our minds, and calculations barely involved plugging in numbers into an equation…..We were required to recall Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments that led to the theories of acids and bases… while my friends in Lebanon were studying ideal gas laws, chemical kinetics, acids and bases, organic chemistry, soaps and detergents, medicinal chemistry and new materials” (Ibo 2010). What does the literature have to say in response to such arguments? Does the presence of the history of chemistry in a curriculum necessarily reduce important content and problem solving skills?

A study of the literature suggests at least three reasons for persisting with aspects of the history of chemistry in the learning and teaching of chemistry.

1. The fact that student conceptions sometimes recapitulate early ideas found in the history of chemistry is seen as offering teachers a means of a deeper understanding of student ideas with the potential for more positive learning outcomes.

2. Conceptual clarity is more easily achieved within an historical context. Often conceptual usefulness is pursued at the expense of conceptual depth (de Berg 2008a).

3. The history of chemistry directly gives us some idea of the epistemological status of chemistry within science and knowledge in general and therefore gives a student access to aspects of the Nature of Science.

This review chapter also examines different ways the history of chemistry has been incorporated into chemistry curricula and looks at the purported advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of such attempts. Some directions for future research in this area are included in the chapter.

This paper selects six key alternative conceptions identified in the literature on student understandings of chemical bonding and illustrates how a historical analysis and a textbook analysis can inform these conceptions and lead to recommendations for improving the teaching and learning of chemical bonding at the secondary school level. The historical analysis and the textbook analysis focus on the concepts of charge, octet, electron pair, ionic, covalent and metallic bonding. Finally, a table of recommendations is made for teacher and student in the light of four fundamental questions and the six alternative conceptions to enhance the quality of the curriculum resources available and the level of student engagement.

According to Lavoisier the physical sciences embody three important ingredients; facts, ideas, and language. Ideas had to be consistent with the facts generated from experiment and observation, and language needed to be precise and reflect the known chemistry of substances. Lavoisier had no time for what he termed theoretical speculation about the fundamental nature of matter and avoided the use of the atomic hypothesis or Aristotle’s elements in his Elements of Chemistry. In the preface to this famous work he claims he has good educational reasons for this position. This paper examines the extent to which Lavoisier kept to this agenda in his famous experiment on the composition of air and the implications of this for chemistry education are considered.

Eight chemistry textbooks written from 1758 to 1891 have been analyzed for the way they present the chemistry of the oxides of tin. This analysis gives insight into the foundation of a number of chemical ideas such as nomenclature and composition used in modern chemistry. Four major preparation techniques for the production of tin oxides emerge from the textbook analysis: the heating of tin in air; the addition of nitric acid to tin; the alkaline hydrolysis of tin (II) and tin (IV) salts; and the acid hydrolysis of alkaline stannate salts. Early textbooks of the period under discussion give lengthy descriptions and explanations for some of these reaction schemes while later textbooks of the period tend to give concise description without explanations. The models used in the explanations are analyzed in some detail and implications drawn for chemistry education. Particular attention is given to the reaction between tin and concentrated nitric acid and a comparison made with the reaction between copper and concentrated nitric acid. Some 20th century concepts are superimposed on the concepts of Lavoisier and Marcet to show how a chemical reaction might be modelled.

This paper reports on students’ understanding of sugar concentration in aqueous solutions presented in two different modes: a visual submicroscopic mode for particles and a verbal mode referring to macroscopic amounts of sugar. One hundred and forty-five tertiary college students studying some form of first-year chemistry participated in the study. For problems of a similar nature, students were much more successful in solving solution concentration problems that were presented verbally than were presented using a submicroscopic representation of particles. The implications of this for chemistry education are outlined in the paper. One contributing factor to the poor success rate with submicroscopic representations (SMR) was possibly the fact that the SMR were presented in multiple-choice format whereas the verbal representations required a short-answer response. While the multiple-choice format may prove deceptive, on account of the way students interpret alternatives containing visual images, students agreed it also proved instructive in highlighting the importance of accounting for volume change in concentration calculations. [from publisher's website].