Chemical Education Research Group

Our investigation, within Terrance s (2000) classification of action research, was collaborative action research. The LON project team existed from three groups of partners Seven teachers from primary schools, six of whom conducted interventions in their schools the adviser for chemistry from the National Board of Education for Slovenia and three chemical education researchers from the Department of Chemical Education and Informatics, University of Ljubljana. 

Chemists and chemical education researchers have this goal in common, but it fails to unite their efforts. The findings of the two groups often are described in separate Jargons and almost always published in separate Journals. In a speech to the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Robert L. Lichter, then Executive Director for the Camille and Henry Dreyfiis Foundation, commented on this separation (7) ... 

I myself would divide the chemical universe into chemical researchers, chemical educators, and chemical education researchers. Only a few people belong to all three groups but many if not most people belong to two, while it cannot be denied that some people identify themselves as belonging to only one. 

Chemical education researchers are typically asked to demonstrate that the test instruments used in their studies are valid and reliable. Validity is the extent to which a question measures what it purports to measure. There are several forms of validity (face validity, content validity, construct validity, etc.), and different forms become relevant for different test instruments. Reliability, on the other hand, is the extent to which the question is stable over time, i.e., if the instrument were administered to similar groups of students at two different times. 

The two alternatives of randomly assigning individual students into groups (which leads to more representative samples) or randomly assigning intact classes of students into groups (which is easier and less obtrusive to the teachers and students involved in the study) demonstrate the complexity of chemical education research in which the researcher trades internal validity for external validity. Internal validity is the extent to which a researcher has controlled... 

When comparing mean scores of one group of students to specific values (one-sample case) or to mean scores of another group of students (two-sample case), chemical education researchers can calculate z-scores only if the standard deviation of the population as a whole is known. Since population standard deviations are almost never known, researchers must estimate these values using sample standard deviations. When this is done, researchers calculate /-scores instead of z-scores. While the z-distribution (normal distribution) is independent of the number of subjects in the study, /-distributions change based on the... 

For one-way ANOVAs, chemical education researchers can compare mean scores for several groups of students (n > 2) based on differences in one independent variable. Repeated (dependent) measures ANOVAs are used when data for the different treatment methods were collected from the same group of students (similar to repeated measures /-tests). Repeated measures... 

ANOVAs have one more advantage over /-tests ANOVAs can compare mean scores of several groups of students based on differences in more than one independent variable. When two independent variables are studied, the test statistics are referred to as two-way ANOVAs (higher-order ANOVAs are possible, but are rarely used by chemical education researchers). The major advantage of performing two-way ANOVAs, instead of two separate one-way ANOVAs or /-tests, is that two-way ANOVAs can determine whether there is a difference due to each of the independent variables (called a main effect) and whether there is an interaction between the two independent variables. This occurs when the effects of one of the variables depends on the other variable (e.g., the effect of an instructional lesson may be different for males and females). The null hypodiesis is that there is no interaction between variables, and the research hypothesis is that there is some sort of interaction. For two-way ANOVAs, there are three F-values calculated The main effect for variable A (F ), the main effect for variable B (Fb), and the interaction between A and B (Faxb)- The dfwiaun value is the same for the three tests = N- kAX ks,... 

One of the major difficulties chemical education researchers (especially those new to the field of educational research) experience is tiying to decide which statistical test would be appropriate for the data they have collected. Table III provides a guideline for choosing an appropriate test statistic for continuous (real) data, given the number and types of student groups involved and the number of independent variables in the research study. 

The nature of chemical education research often dictates that we must work with the students and course organization that we have. Unfortunately this may not be the optimal research design. Many of the studies on interventions designed to improve the learning process do not have the option of using randomized control and treatment groups of students. While there are methods... 

Chander Mohan was born in 1975 at Dhariwal, Punjab, India. He received his B.Pharm. and M.Tech.(Pharm.) in bulk drugs from Guru Nanak Dev University and the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Mohali. After that he worked as senior chemist at Dr. Reddy s Research Foundation, Hyderabad. He then joined Professor M. P. Mahajan s research group in 2002 for his doctoral studies. His research is focused on the synthesis and chemical transformation of C-5/C-6-substituted pyrimidinones. His research interests include synthesis of medicinally important molecules, transition metal-induced transformations in organic synthesis, reaction mechanism and total synthesis of natural products. 

After participating in the development of the MINDO method in Michael Dewar s group, Colin Baird initiated a research program at Western Ontario based on ab initio calculations on the ground and excited states of molecules.220 221 Over the years his interests shifted more to chemical education, with a special interest in developing concepts and materials for environmental chemistry. 

Purvis, M. and Bauler, J. 2004. Irresponsible Care The Eailure of the Chemical Industry to Protect the Public from Chemical Accidents. US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, Washington, DC. 

Objectives of the project are to gather information that will help to harmonize and integrate Associated Candidate Countries (ACC) and New Member States (NMS) infrastructures and activities in the field of chemical food safety with those of Member States (MS) and to provide the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) with a network of scientists, researchers, institutions able to address the different aspects of the chemical contaminants in food. In addition, through participation in this project, scientists and research groups will have the opportunity to join mainstream research activities, such as the ones developed in Food Chemical Safety in Europe (FOSIE), the NoE Chemicals as contaminants in the food chain an NoE for research, risk assessment and education. (CASCADE), the project Harmonized Environmental Indicators for Pesticide Risk (HAIR), or to promote new projects in the field of food safety. 

---