Review of Teaching Chemistry—A Studybook: A Practical Guide and

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Review of Teaching ChemistryA Studybook: A Practical Guide and Textbook for Student Teachers, Teacher Trainees and Teachers Sarah B. Boesdorfer* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614, United States Teaching ChemistryA Studybook: A Practical Guide and Textbook for Student Teachers, Teacher Trainees and Teachers, edited by Ingo Eilks and Avi Hofstein. Sense Publishers: Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2013. 336 pp. ISBN: 978-9462091382 (paperback). $43.

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ll students need chemistry; it is part of being scientifically literate. Chemistry education for all students should start from contexts or societal issues. These two sentences summarize the theme connecting the chapters of Teaching ChemistryA Studybook: A Practical Guide and Textbook for Student Teachers, Teacher Trainees and Teachers. While this is an edited book with a collection of chapters by different authors, the theme of scientific and chemical literacy for all students is a theme addressed at some level in every chapter, providing a clearer connection between the chapters than is often true in edited books. The importance of chemistry to help students participate in society, make choices, and understand their lives is a value expressed by the authors of each chapter. The 11 chapters in this book cover a number of topics relevant to chemistry education, including curriculum, motivation, teaching methods, learning in the laboratory, use of models, and use of technology in the chemistry classroom. Each chapter provides a section called Theoretical Basis for the topic of the chapter, which describes some of the important research and theories on the chapter topic. These reviews do an effective job summarizing the major work on each topic in a manner that is accessible to a wide audience, yet by design the reviews are not exhaustive. Each chapter also has a section called The Practice of Chemistry Teaching, which offers some advice or specific examples for teachers to use directly in the classroom. As with any edited book, some of the advice sections are better (e.g., Chapter 5) than others (e.g., Chapter 9). One of the best aspects of this text is the effort to connect readers with resources: resource lists, Internet resources, and a short list of suggested readings are incorporated at the end of each chapter distinct from the extensive reference list. While the issues and examples addressed in the book are relevant mostly for chemistry in secondary schools, many of the topicsfor example, learning in the laboratory or the use of modelsapply to chemistry education at all levels. Harris1 described the need for an up-to-date textbook for training chemistry teachers for secondary school. The research in Teaching ChemistryA Studybook is much more up-to-date than Essentials of Chemical Education,2 which Harris was referring to, but it is not the book to fill the gap for training chemistry teachers. With the exception of the final two chapters which are about teachers, not necessarily for teachersthe book’s primary audience is secondary chemistry teachers, which might make it useful as a text for training teachers. As Eilks and Hofstein suggest in the introduction, the chapters in the book provide © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

Cover image provided by Sense Publishers and reproduced with permission.

chemistry-specific examples and explanations on many general education (e.g., motivation and technology use) or science education topics (e.g., laboratory experiments), so it can help teachers develop an understanding of how to teach chemistry specifically, not science generally. But it is just a discussion of some topics for teaching chemistry; it is as the title states a “studybook” or “practical guide”. It does not discuss enough of the skills a chemistry teacher needs that methods textbooks such as The Chemistry Classroom3 or the more general science textbook Teaching High School Science through Inquiry and Argumentation4 discuss. Missing, for example, is a discussion of classroom management and safety. While it provides chemistry-specific ideas and examples, Teaching ChemistryA Studybook does not provide a cohesive picture of what a chemistry teacher does or should do that most preservice teachers want and need. Ultimately, this book can be useful for starting conversations on issues facing chemistry teachers at all levels. The theoretical overviews and practical examples provide information and ideas for intelligent conversations and changes to begin. However, this book is only the beginning of these conversations, because though it is specific to teaching chemistry, the book is not specific to the environment the chemistry is taught in. The book has 27 authors from 10 different countries; it references and cites movements from a variety of different (though mostly Western) countries. However, this means that it misses topics important and relevant for specific countries. For example, there is no discussion of the standards movement within education. For chemistry teachers in the United States, the release of the Next Generation Science Standards5 that 26 states have already agreed to consider adopting into their state curriculum means Published: April 22, 2013 532

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Journal of Chemical Education

Book and Media Review

that standards must be an important part of conversations they are having about curriculum (Chapter 1), objectives (Chapter 2), and laboratory learning (Chapter 6). So Teaching ChemistryA Studybook is a tool, a sourcebook, for chemistry teachers at all levels, and teacher educators. It provides good ideas with references and tools for beginning to improve chemistry teaching; the specifics will have to be decided based on the literature and initiatives specific to the teaching environment.

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. Notes

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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REFERENCES

(1) Harris, H. H. Review of Essentials of Chemical Education. J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89, 1347−1348. (2) Barke, H.-D.; Harsch, G.; Schmid, S. Essentials of Chemical Education; Springer: Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, New York, 2012. (3) Herron, J. D. The Chemistry Classroom: Formulas for Successful Teaching; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1996. (4) Llweellyn, D. Teaching High School Science through Inquiry and Argumentation; Corwin: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2013. (5) Achieve, Inc. Next Generation Science Standards. http://www. nextgenscience.org/ (accessed Apr 2013).

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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400127e | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 532−533