Situating constructivism in contemporary times to promote chemistry education and conceptual gains

For decades now, the chemistry education research communities have undertaken several studies on the improvement of the study of chemistry at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. Some amount of progress has been made, as observed from literature reviews (Taber, 2002; Sam, et al., 2016; Ilyas, et al., 2017; Talanquer, 2017), but to a large extent, chemistry is still presented in a formal abstracted manner; sometimes close to being algorithmic, which makes understanding and application of chemical principles, a far-fetched dream for learners. Chemistry is hardly taught with a touch that links formal classroom chemistry to everyday life chemistry. Such non-connective procedures negatively affect students’ desires to learn higher chemistry, as they often cannot connect concepts which are taught abstractly and in isolation to each other to their everyday lives. Therefore, a shift from the robotic traditional insensitive procedures to engaging procedures at the secondary, tertiary, and especially teacher training levels of education is required. This study, which is still on-going, has to a large extent been promoting simple, less costly, learning environments, sometimes with robust equipment, that promote and foster constructivist pedagogies to enable students form their own authentic concepts through fun-filled, engaging social interactions. The implication here is that, new modes of assessments must be developed to meet this new approach to knowledge construction. This presentation will be based only on the engaging approaches that have been evidently useful in the Ghanaian setting and which could be useful in other less endowed communities for knowledge construction and conceptual growth in chemistry.

Keywords: chemical principles, communities, constructivism, traditional learning