Hidden misunderstandings

Chemistry education aims to help students to build conceptual understanding to support competence in problem solving. A key challenge for assessors is to find a way to genuinely test students’ understanding of concepts and their ability to apply this to the problem in hand. It has previously been shown that students are often able to answer questions correctly simply by applying algorithms and rules.

Nyachwaya and colleagues have investigated the ways in which college students use such memorised algorithms in tackling questions related to chemical reactions.