LIMITATIONS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING REDOX: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

Redox reactions are considered one of the most difficult chemistry subjects to teach and learn. However, this is an important content that permeates several topics and includes many everyday life-related phenomena. To understand the teaching and learning difficulties of the ‘redox reactions’ topic, a systematic literature review was conducted. Initially, 318 articles were mapped, between the years 2000 to 2019, related to the teaching of redox reactions. The inventoried articles were analyzed to identify, in their results, the aforementioned difficulties. Only 54 presented difficulties related to teaching and learning redox reactions. To analyze these articles, the year of publication, the conceptual/procedural difficulties resulting from the study, the researched participants, and the strategies used throughout the data collection were adopted as categories. As a result, the main participants of the investigations were students. It was observed that the research studies favored bachelor degree as the level of education. Moreover, most of the analyzed studies mainly proposed experimentation as teaching strategy for teaching redox reactions. This study points to the need for continuing education courses for chemistry teachers to discuss emerging difficulties, in addition to proposing teaching strategies to remedy these difficulties. Keywords: education proposals, learning difficulties, redox reactions, state of the art