Students Mental Models on Acids and Bases via Alternative Assessment

Students encounter many real life events from an early age and they relate to what they already know and construct cohe rent understanding of these events. During in chemistry learning process, students often experience difficulties and lack conceptual understanding of basic concepts even though their effort. In the current study, acids and bases concepts were investigated, which is one of the fundamental topics in chemistry and easily influenced by daily language and experiences. The participants were 40 eleventh grade high school students ; and their initial ideas about the acidity and basicity of materials, substances or e vents, and their understanding of acids and bases concepts to address their nature of mental models of acids and bases were investigated via an alternative assessment tool . In order to assess students’ ideas on acids and bases a reading log, one of alterna tive assessment techniques, was used, which included daily life events that students might find interesting to learn. The most significant finding was that none of the students or groups used any scientific model in determining the acidity or basicity of t he substances. Their decisions and explanations in determining the substances’ acidity or basicity was quite in basic level, none of them not even consider any scientific exploration when having difficulties in the determination process. Therefore, student - centered instructions with inquiries, hands - and minds - on activities with more laboratory usage, and more frequently giving real - life examples related to topics might increase students’ scientific models and meaningful understanding of the concepts. In ad dition, teachers, curriculum developers, and textbook writers should clearly emphasize on the nature of science to help students understand and interpret their surroundings