wonderful life in chemical education

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Attract Students to Learn Chem

For the majority of students, especially for the students in high schools, they have too much misunderstanding for chemistry. They believe that chemistry is hard and boring. Besides, because of plenty of chemical reactions, they feel that chemistry require higher ability for memory and transcendental understanding. Actually, due to the wrong direction of these concepts, students could hard to find the real interest on chemistry.

For this situation, in my mind, instructors should try to show some attractive things that are contained in the chemistry rather than just teaching them boring chemistry knowledge. On YouTube, there are plenty of funny chemical reaction videos. These videos are a good tool to attract students to study chemistry and it is helpful for students to learn chem in an easy way. And I believe some interesting experiments also can motivate students to focus on the study chemistry. Therefore, instructors should work hard on attracting students to study chem instead of teaching them in a traditional method. No one loves boring classes!

funny chemical reactions

Most Interesting and Awesome Chemical Reactions Compilation. Retrieved February 17, 2014, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfW7KztrA8I

the Other Kind of Bullying

In general, we usually believe that children’s aggressive behaviors come from the the effect of alcohol and drugs as well as the influence of growing environment. However, as a matter of fact, we ignore the great effects of mass media in modern society such as television.

On the one hand, we desire to enhance the number of entertainment for children, but for entertainment producer, they prefer to make more profits from these objects regardless of the aggressive influence. Therefore, children would be easier to get more violent plots from TV.It’s not surprising that learners’ affective reactions are often inextricably intertwined with their thinking and learning. And for children, if they learn things like this from media, it is no doubt to say their behaviors would be more aggressive.

On the other hand, not only should parents pay attention to the impact from media, but also teachers and local educators should focus on reducing the proportion of violent actions which result from media. Therefore, for remedying the situation, firstly, they should notice that learners can also associate specific topics and pieces of information with certain emotions, in other words, learners are more likely to pay attention to think actively about, and remember emotionally charged information. Thus, educators should avoid referring to the topics about violence and conveying the aggressive emotion to their students.

Social Media, Bullying, & Mental Health

Social Media, Bullying, & Mental Health. Retrieved October 26, 2013, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTsR3cRtLQk

An Impressive Organic Chem Class in College

In the process of studying organic chemistry, there were some extremely tough opinions about the chemical reaction mechanism. For sophomores, these concepts would be hard to be understood and be applied in the prediction of organic products. Therefore, our organic chemistry professor adopt a special activity to teach us to understand these difficult concepts rather than teach these knowledge according to our textbook.

At that class, he brought a lot of molecule models. And then, he divided us into five groups and each groups could get some atoms models(these are some small balls with some holes in different colors) and some short bars(in general, these bars are used as the bonds that can connect these single atoms). He showed us some simple reactions and asked us describing these reactions by using these tools. After that, he told us the steps which we tried to explain these simple reactions are the process of reacting, in other words, we had learned these hard concepts by playing these balls as well as bars. However, that was not the ending of that activity. Then, he gave us some difficult reactions that we could not explain by these props. After making sure that we could nor figure it out, he showed us some dynamic pictures to describe the process of these reactions. It was no doubt to believe that we could understand them immediately, because it showed them directly even though these reactions were abstract.

From that class, we could never forgot these hard concepts, and from that we also knew some skills about how to use them in some practical problems. At present, owing to the useful methods to teach us, chemical reaction mechanism is the easiest part of organic chemistry for us.

the structure of some organic molecules

Organic compound. Retrieved November 2, 2014, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/431954/organic-compound

Monday, March 16, 2015

Two reasoning methods

In general, students have two reasoning to solve chemistry problems, one is algorithm reasoning, and the other is concept reasoning. When some students prefer to use algorithm reasoning, some students would like to use concept reasoning. Algorithm reasoning that the majority of students use is solving problems by memory and execute a series of programmer as well as formulas. Concept reasoning based on the core concepts which relate to the understanding and solving problems, solves problems by logical reasoning. As a matter of fact, well-structural algorithm reasoning is also based on the understanding of scientific concepts.

For example, for problems to analyze the composition, concentration of solution, the mass change and the energy change of chemical reaction, using algorithm problems is easy and the process is clear and simple to imitate. However, at the beginning of learning, it is abstract and hard to understand. For concept reasoning, it is easy to understand without standard processes, but require higher standard of mind ability.

Professor Steven Pinker - Concepts & Reasoning

Professor Steven Pinker - Concepts & Reasoning. Retrieved Oct 3, 2014, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNDx35xn-e4

Basics of Algorithms : What is an Algorithm ?

Basics of Algorithms : What is an Algorithm ? Retrieved Oct 3, 2014, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40GHilyDwpc

How to express concentration in solution?

For the concentration of solution, there are plenty of methods to illustrate it. In general, in our daily lives, people prefer to use mass fraction of solute to show the concentration of solution, because this method is convenient. However, for chemistry studying, people prefer to use molar mass fraction of solute, because this method is easy to make any chemical calculations.

Actually, in chemical calculation, there are four methods to compute the concentrations. 1. Mass concentration: The mass concentration is defined as the mass of a constituent divided by the volume of the mixture V. 2. Molar concentration: The molar concentration is defined as the amount of a constituent in moles divided by the volume of the mixture V. 3. Number concentration: The number concentration is defined as the number of entities of a constituent in a mixture divided by the volume of the mixture V. 4. Volume concentration: The volume concentration is defined as the volume of a constituent divided by the volume of the mixture V.

concentration calculation formula

ChemBuddy. Retrieved March 17, 2015, from http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=CASC&right=concentration-cheat-sheet

The relationship between teaching and studying

Classes should not become the teacher’s classes. No matter where classes are, the classes which only contain teachers but ignoring students’ feeling should be criticized. No matter how good the teacher is. This kind of classes is useless for students. Nowadays, instructors in elementary, high schools and even in universities could only teach students some knowledge from the books rather than the real knowledge from the real world. For the majority of classes, instructors are easy to ignore students’ motivations and forget to inspire them to find their own methods to solve the similar problems. Actually, even though this kind of teaching method can help students take advantage of new knowledge quickly, it also brings a series troubles to students.

In my mind, teaching and learning belong to the same system. During the process of teaching, instructors should notice students’ learning structure and the degree of education. In other words, for a class, instructors should care every student’s learning process rather than focusing on teaching what they should know. When students face any problems during the process of learning, instructors should be able to change the schedules of teaching to adapt to students.

Teaching and Learning

The Teaching and Learning Framework. Retrieved March 16, 2015, from http://schoolself-evaluation.ie/post-primary/index.php/teaching-learning-framework/?doing_wp_cron=1426566247.7628149986267089843750