Make worked examples count in quantitative chemistry

By Helen Skelton2024-12-11T06:36:00

Source: © Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Four teacher-tested approaches to encourage self-explanation and build learners’ confidence, engagement and understanding

14–16 and 16–18 students are often able to follow steps to answer a specific problem type correctly when learning quantitative chemistry. But they struggle when they’re faced with a mixture of different, unfamiliar problems to solve. This suggests that they follow procedures without a deep understanding of why individual steps are important. Read this article to discover four approaches to encourage students to use self-explanation in worked examples and tackle unfamiliar problems and identify mistakes. Using these step-by-step approaches can help build learners’ confidence, engagement and understanding too.

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