Analysis of Students’ Epistemic Reasoning and Understanding of the Solubility Equilibrium
Abstract
Solubility equilibria constitute an essential content of the introductory chemistry curriculum. To detect students’ learning difficulties regarding how such equilibrium is reached and what happens during this process, an open-ended questionnaire was designed. The answers were analysed by means of a phenomenographic analysis, which made it possible to define interpretative categories of the student body. The epistemological analysis of the arguments offers «intermediate explanations» between naive and scientific ideas, as well as fragmented answers and internal inconsistency. Our results show that the understanding of solubility equilibria is hampered by deficiencies in the understanding of the concepts of equilibrium, salt solubility and saturation of a solution as well as by difficulties to relate all these concepts.
Keywords
Solubility equilibria, Solubility, Saturation, Solubility curves, Explanatory categoriesReferences
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