New Perspectives in Science Education
How to improve the learning of the Chemistry at the University using a blog.
Santiago Rojano Ramos, Department of Didactic of Experimental Sciences, Faculty of Education Sciences, University of Malaga, Spain (Spain)
María del Mar López Guerrero, Department of Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Malaga, Spain. (Spain)
Abstract
The teaching of chemistry has several difficulties for several reasons: the lack of interest and motivation in students, complex experimental processes and little connection between the curriculum of compulsory education and university. This causes a negative idea about the subject of chemistry and a rejection of it. For these reasons, it was thought that the use of ICTs could be very beneficial for chemistry teaching and learning in students. In general, ICT can help us to increase participation of students in the area and would improve the direct intervention of the students which motivates to the students in their learning. Among the large number of ICT tools that exist today, we have chosen to create a blog in order to enhance learning and academic performance of students.
On the other hand, today, virtually all students have smartphone and internet access, therefore they are able to take photos, search on internet and download videos to insert into the blog content.
The main novelty of this work consists of developing a blog, where the students are responsibe for the design, development and inclusion of material in the blog. Thus, they are developing the blog and it is enhanced them because they are looking for materials to include in the blog. The teacher created a basic model of blog in which they could made changes and progressively built contents that appeared on the blog. They were able to insert text, videos, practical activities, reading, links to websites, articles in relation with the subject,..
Finally, once developed the blog, it was done a qualitative and quantitative analysis about the learning produced and it was studied the influence of the blog in the academic marks of our students.
The study was based in a comparative test fo 10 questions related with the topics of the subject. Two groups have particapated in this experience. A first group of students, who participated, designed and entered the blog and a second group that had not been involved in the blog. These results allowed to evaluate the effectiveness of the blog in learning chemistry.
This study demonstrated that developing blogs by students significantly increased the number scientifcally acceptable ideas in student´s conceptions of science at the end of the semester.
Conclusion
The use of blog can be helpful in improving problem solving. This encourages students to develop new ideas about science in their minds, and allow them to create a memory from viewing animations, leading to confirmation or modification of the existing mental model.
