Book and Media Review pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of Essentials of Chemical Education Hal H. Harris* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of MissouriSt. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63121, United States and physics preservice students crave materials that use content and examples from the science they will be teaching. Arons’ classic, Teaching Introductory Physics7 and, to a lesser extent, Five Easy Lessons,8 by Randall Knight or Peer Instruction9 by Eric Mazur resonate with them. Essentials of Chemical Education2 also has this characteristic, in that it includes experiments, demonstrations, exercises, and chemical connections to everyday life in its 321 pageseven more so than did The Chemistry Classroom.4 Because only a limited amount of updating has been done since the original edition, reading Essentials of Chemical Education2 is like a trip back into the previous decade. One sees nothing of some of the major science pedagogical projects since then: peer-led team learning,10 modeling chemistry,11 POGIL (process-oriented, guided-inquiry learning),12 or the science writing heuristic13 in its pages, but it uses the phenomena-oriented and inquiry-based network concept (PIN-Concept), developed by Harsch and Heimann 14 illustrated in Chapter 9 to teach organic chemistry. Chapters 1−7 provide the philosophical introduction to this approach: “Learners’ Ideas and Misconceptions”; “Motivation”; “Teaching Aims”; “Media”; “Experiments”; “Structural and Mental Models”; and “Scientific Terminology and Symbols”, respectively. Chapter 8 connects “Everyday Life and Chemistry” through 17 brief vignettes. Some of these are dated (development of black-and-white film) and others will seem foreign to the American reader (e.g., chimney sweeps checking for CO, CO2, and exhaust temperatures). These vignettes are not completely developed lessons, but only suggest connections between, for example, oxidation−reduction with plumbing cleaners (called “tab cleaners” here) and acid−base chemistry with baking powder. The book uses an interesting graphic scheme, a series of four concentric pie charts, to illustrate the ways in which learners (at the center) are connected through teaching processes (second level) to scientific ideas (third level) to the human element (fourth level). I do not think that this textbook will fill the obvious need for an up-to-date resource for a “methods of teaching chemistry” course in the U.S. market, because it does not adequately connect with the contemporary literature in English, it is not well aligned with the American curriculum (little organic chemistry is typically taught in our secondary schools, for example), and, despite a brief section in Chapter 5 on safety and waste disposal, it does not consistently deal with those topics in a manner acceptable in U.S. schools. An example of this is the student experiment in which a rock salt solution is electrolyzed with a mercury electrode, producing chlorine-free sodium hydroxide solution, chlorine gas, and hydrogen. Students are advised to “return the mercury to the storage
Essentials of Chemical Education, by Hans-Dieter Barke, Günther Harsch, and Siegbert Schmid, translated by Hannah Gerdau. Springer: Berlin and Heidelberg, 2012. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-3642217555 (hardcover). $99.00. Chemiedidaktik Heute1 was published in Germany in 2001 and Essentials of Chemical Education2 is a translation, with some updating. My impression is that the amount of revision was not large. Not having read the book in German, I cannot say for sure, but of the several hundred references, less than 10% have dates after 2001. One of the more recent references is Misconceptions in Chemistry,3 with one of the same authors and the same publisher. A very large fraction of the citations are from sources in German, which greatly decreases their utility to monolingual Americans. It is not difficult to find awkward phraseology and a few typos (the first one I noticed is at the end of the first sentence, on page 1 of the Introduction). Those problems, including the fact that Table 5.1 remains entirely in German, is evidence that the book was not carefully edited, but they do not subtract substantially from its utility.
Cover image provided by Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg and reproduced with permission.
So, what is it good for? First, it is one of the few available textbooks that actually address the teaching of chemistry. Since Dudley Herron’s excellent The Chemistry Classroom,4 published in 1996 and now out of print, only Chemists’ Guide to Ef fective Teaching5 and Survival Handbook for the New Chemistry Instructor6 come to mind. The first of these is aimed at trained chemists who are faced with teaching in a college setting and the second is a guide for new faculty members facing their first teaching assignments. Many parts of either of these could be helpful to one preparing to teach in secondary schools, but they are not as well aimed as is (was) The Chemistry Classroom.4 Of course, a number of crossdisciplinary “methods of teaching science” books are available on the market, but my chemistry © 2012 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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Journal of Chemical Education
Book and Media Review
bottle”. American schools are so mercurophobic that the teacher who allowed high school students to do this would likely become part of the unemployment problem. Nevertheless, I think that Essentials of Chemical Education can be a useful addition to the library of teachers of chemistry teachers.
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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) Barke, H.-D.; Harsch, G. Chemiedidaktik Heute; Springer: Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, and New York, 2001. (2) Barke, H.-D.; Harsch, G.; Schmid, S. Essentials of Chemical Education; Springer: Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, and New York, 2012. (3) Barke, H.-D.; Hazari, A.; Yitbarek, S. Misconceptions in Chemistry: Addressing Perceptions in Chemical Education; Springer: Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, and New York, 2009. A review of this book appeared in J. Chem. Educ. 2011, 88 (4), 386. (4) Herron, J. D. The Chemistry Classroom: Formulas for Successful Teaching; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1996. (5) Pienta, N. J.; Cooper, M. M.; Greenbowe, T. J. Chemists’ Guide to Effective Teaching; Pearson/Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005. (6) Bunce, D. M.; Muzzi, C. M. Survival Guide for the New Chemistry Instructor; Pearson/Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004. (7) Arons, A. B. Teaching Introductory Physics; Wiley: New York, 1997. (8) Knight, R. D. Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching; Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA, 2003. (9) Mazur, E. Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual; Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997. (10) The Center for Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) Web page. http://www.pltl.org/ (accessed Aug 2012). See also Gosser, D. K.; Cracolice, M. S.; Kampmeier, J. A.; Roth, V.; Strozak, V. S.; VarmaNelson, P. Peer-Led Team Learning: A Guidebook; Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001. (11) Legacy Web page for Modeling Instruction in High School Physics, Chemistry, Physical Science, and Biology. http://modeling. asu.edu/ (accessed Sep 2012). (12) Process-Oriented, Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Web Page. http://www.pogil.org/ (accessed Sep 2012). (13) The Process of the Science Writing Heuristic Home Page. http://avogadro.chem.iastate.edu/SWH/homepage.htm (accessed Sep 2012). (14) Harsch, G.; Heimann, R. Didaktik der Organischen Chemie nach dem PIN-Konzept. Vom Ordnen der Phänomene zum vernetzten Denken; Springer: Heidelberg, 1998.
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