Investigating the presence of misconceptions of 8th grade students through multiple-choice questions at national chemistry competition test

Abstract

A study was conducted to test the level of conceptual understanding of certain chemistry concepts defined in the national curriculum in Macedonia among 8th grade students who participated in the National chemistry competition in the 2016/17 school year. The students were tested on the following topics: state of matter, metals and non-metals, elementary substances, compounds and mixtures, chemical reactions and introduction to organic chemistry. An analysis of the multiple-choice questions was performed in order to categorize students’ achievements in four areas of conceptual understanding (satisfactory conceptual understanding, roughly adequate performance, inadequate performance, and quite inadequate performance) according to the percentage of students who correctly answered the test items. Furthermore, the findings revealed three misconceptions and several vague and erroneous notions present in students’ minds.

Keywords

• conceptual understanding
• lower-secondary education
• misconceptions
• multiple-choice questions
• national chemistry competition.