DIAGNOSIS OF STUDENTS’ MISCONCEPTION ON CHEMICAL BONDING USING FOUR-TIER DIAGNOSTIC INSTRUMENT

Abstract

Chemical bonding is one of the key concepts in chemistry and the most fundamental one. Chemical bonding is a topic that students commonly find abstract and problematic. Thus, chemical bonding is considered as difficult topic and students had misconception about bond polarity, intermolecular force, the octet rule, shapes, conductivity and lattice energy. The purpose of this study was to identify the major misconceptions of grade 10 and 12 students’ in the chemical bonding and to identify the sources of these misconceptions. The nature of the study is a descriptive setting. Participants of the study were 80 grade 10 students and 64 grade 12 students. The 4TMCT was developed after their prior conceptions about the selected topics of the study were collected from students through review of related literature, observation of lessons on chemical bonding, common mistakes of focus class students during different assessment techniques (answering worksheets, class tests) and individual interview questions with volunteer students. Data was collected by using 4TMCTand Interview questions were employed to gather the relevant data. Data was analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Science program (SPSS). The results from SPSS (bivariate and reliability analysis) showed that average value of reliability coefficient and correlation between first and second tiers, third tiers and fourth tiers, second tier and both confidence tiers were 0.98, 0.95, 0.94, 0.9 of grade 10 students and 0.97,0.92, 0.94, 0.88 of grade twelve students respectively. The results also revealed that chemistry daily experiences, text books, language difficulty, subject matter knowledge of students and chemistry instructional methods were the major source of students’ misconception about chemical bonding. The result showed that the majority of the students had high level of difficulty about chemical bonding. In this study the common misconceptions were identified on chemical boding which was categorized into: bond polarity, intermolecular force, intramolecular force, the octet rule, solubility, shapes, conductivity and lattice energy.