Changes to A-level chemistry

As part of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)-led initiative, Chemistry for our future (CFOF), funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), school teacher fellow, David Read at the University of Southampton, has produced a report of his initial findings on the content of the new AS- and A-level chemistry specifications, which will be first taught in schools from September 2008.  

This work forms part of the CFOF strand which focuses on the secondary-tertiary interface and improving teachers' and lecturers' understanding of recent developments in chemical education. The overarching aim is to support chemistry students as they move from school to university by, for example, identifying gaps in their knowledge, depending on the awarding body of their A-level, and addressing these.  

The 2008 A-level chemistry core remains at 60 per cent and the specifications of all the awarding bodies now include entropy, electrode potentials and the use of energetics to predict the feasibility of a chemical reaction. In general, Read finds that there is now more consistency and overlap across the specifications. He told Education in Chemistry, 'This is good for universities because there will be fewer gaps in the knowledge of incoming students, and good for teachers because more textbooks will be relevant to all the different specifications'.