Augmented reality for chemistry education to promote the use of chemical terminology in teacher training

Abstract

Chemistry as a whole is divided into three levels. The macroscopic level describes real, observable phenomena of the material world. The submicroscopic level focuses on particles. The representative level includes pictorial and symbolic representations to visualize substance in its nature. Students often have problems separating these levels and conceptually transfer each of the three levels to the other. Therefore, teachers need to use chemical terminology correctly when teaching the substance-particle concept. Augmented Reality (AR) connects real and virtual world. The observer physically moves in a real environment that integrates virtual elements. The AR technology has great potential for learning in the subject chemistry, especially when it comes to making the “invisible” visible and illustrating scientific phenomena at particle level. The simultaneous presentation should avoid split-attention and offers new possibilities to interactively deal with (M)ER. The question arises whether AR has a positive effect on the use of technical language and the associated understanding of the concept of dealing with (M)ER at the substance and particle levels. With an AR app on the tablet and the AR glasses, the chemical processes of a real experiment are represented by AR visualizations. Therefore, the AR app was piloted. This study captured the chemistry handling with (M)ER of chemistry teachers (N = 30) using a pre-post survey. The participating preservice teachers are described below. Each test includes five tasks elaborated by thinking aloud. The thinking-aloud protocols to acquire the use of the chemical terminology are evaluated in MAXQDA.