Leveraging TikTok to enhance understanding and engagement in university chemistry students: a South African case study

This study explores TikTok’s potential as an educational tool in South African undergraduate chemistry education. TikTok is a social media platform that enables users to create, share, and explore brief videos. TikTok’s user-friendly interface and creative features offer an engaging platform for learning. While learning technologies have traditionally supported knowledge transfer, research highlights their cognitive, behavioural, and affective benefits. Through a teaching intervention and qualitative feedback, students reported improved understanding of complex concepts. The TikTok assignment aligned with both inquiry-based learning (IBL) and decolonial pedagogies, encouraging independent inquiry, collaboration, and cultural relevance by valuing students’ voices and contexts. Though the study reflects a short-term, context-specific case and is not generalisable, it provides useful insights into students’ positive perceptions of using social media in science education. The findings indicate that integrating social media tools into the curriculum within the South African higher education landscape can introduce innovative learning methods. Future research should encompass a wider range of establishments and extend over longer durations to enhance its generalizability and address the current study’s limitations.