High School Students’ Understanding of Solution Concepts

Abstract

Solution concepts were one of the fundamental and important concepts for chemistry and biology, including the use in everyday life. However, the evaluation of students’ achievement in solution topic focused on the
calculations rather than concepts. The purpose of this research had to explore students’ conceptual understanding about solution concepts. The participants were 50 high school students from a boy school in Thonburi district that had leaned solution concepts. The scientific concept questionnaire, which 16 open-ended items, was used to gather the information about students’ conceptual understanding in seven solution concepts. These were solution and composition of the solution, percentage, part per million and part
per billion, molarity, molality, mole fraction and solution preparation. The data was analyzed by coding and grouping using Abraham et al (1994) ideas. The results found that 23 percent of students held sound understanding, 32 percent of students held partial understanding, 26 percent of students held partial understanding with a specific misconceptions, 4 percent of students held misconceptions and 15 percent of students do not have concept. The most difficulty concepts for most of the students were molarity and molality. The research results suggested that teaching and learning solution topic should promote students’
conceptual understanding effectively, so that students are able to use these concepts in their daily lives and in the basic of learning other science concepts.