Students' chemical literacy level: A case on electrochemistry topic

Abstract

The study purpose to analysis the students' chemical literacy level of electrochemistry topic. Descriptive study with a quantitive approach was done. There were 148 twelfth-grade students as samples that came from two senior high schools in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The Electrochemistry Chemical Literacy Test (ECLT) was used to gain the data. The ECLT had fifteenth open-ended questions that covers four concepts, i.e. redox reaction, voltaic cell, electrolysis, and corrosion. To ensure the content validity of ECLT, a group of experts have looked at and give some suggestions. The students' responses toward ECLT was examined quantitatively and categorized into five levels: illiterate, nominal, conceptual, functional, and multidimensional ones. The results shown that the mostly students achieved at nominal and conceptual level, also illiterate in almost similar percentages. The lowest achievements were for functional and multidimensional level. In the view of concepts, corrosion gained best result, meanwhile electrolysis have lowest result. These suggest that the chemistry teachers should facilitate an appropriate and conducive learning environment for students' learning. It is useful for enhancing the chemical literacy level, especially by conduct context-based chemistry learning.