Using Concept Maps to Support Prospective Chemistry Teachers in Interconnecting Chemical Contents

Marina Birkenstock^1, and David-Samuel Di Fuccia¹

¹Department of Science and Mathematics, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

Cite this paper:
Marina Birkenstock and David-Samuel Di Fuccia. Using Concept Maps to Support Prospective Chemistry Teachers in Interconnecting Chemical Contents. American Journal of Educational Research. 2023; 11(6):364-371. doi: 10.12691/education-11-6-4

Abstract

The aim of this approach is to support chemistry teacher students to better interconnect chemical contents during their studies. This is focused on university level and thereby referred on university course contents as we assume that at this point students are missing relevant interconnections among chemical subdisciplines. Therefore, we developed and tested a tool to better demonstrate the interconnectedness of chemistry topics. In a first step, an advance organizer in the form of a concept map was designed to help students to realize and internalize connections between chemical topics. The design of the concept map focusses on the required contents for prospective high school teachers. A case study was performed to investigate the effect of these concept maps on the students’ awareness of interconnections and their understanding of interconnection. They were interviewed, performed eye-tracking while working with a concept map and created interconnecting tasks to see if they could adapt the idea of interconnection. Additionally, the students had to write a learning diary based on key question during the whole length of the study. First results are available and will be described in this article.

Keywords:
interconnecting chemical contents content knowledge higher education concept maps

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