Searching for solutions

Students’ understanding of solutions can be somewhat shallow, even at advanced levels of study, and this has been the subject of a great deal of research in recent years. Kevin de Berg has carried out an investigation to probe how well students in their first year at tertiary level understand the concept of solution concentration, leading to interesting outcomes.

The introduction provides a useful synopsis of previous research in this area, highlighting the challenges faced by students in rationalising the macroscopic phenomenon of solution formation (eg what they see when sugar dissolves in water) and the submicroscopic representations (SMR) used in teaching. Other studies cited identified the difficulties associated with unifying verbal reasoning with visual representation, an issue also encountered in this study.