Teachers’ Teaching Strategies, Opportunities, and Challenges When Developing Conceptual Understanding of Redox Reactions

Teaching redox reactions requires careful investigation as learners often display a range of misconceptions, particularly in connecting the chemistry levels of representation: macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic. This study explores teachers’ teaching strategies, opportunities, and challenges when developing conceptual understanding of redox reactions. The study is guided by the pedagogical link-making framework while supported by the expanding triangle chemistry-learning framework. An interpretive approach was followedusing an interview protocol and observation criteria document to collect qualitative data. A purposely sampled group of ten chemistry teachers teaching in public schools in rural settings were interviewed, and three had lessons video/audio recorded and transcribed verbatim and analyzed using ATLAS-ti. The study results displayed as networks, Sankey frequency diagrams and text show that teachers used various strategies from passive to active strategies. Teachers adopted passive and active teaching strategies to enhance learners’ learningprogression of concepts. Teaching opportunities are presented as the positive applications of dimensions for conceptual understanding, contextualized analogical models and the provision of relevance of redox reactions. The teachers’ active teaching strategies enhanced the relevance of the concepts by connecting them to learners’ lives. Teaching challenges were limited content knowledge leading to challenges in shifting across levels of representation, particularly from the sub-microscopic level. Teachers demonstrated inadequate pedagogical skills that enhance conceptual understanding. Recommendations include developing focused professional development in pedagogical content knowledge of the particulate nature of matter, particularly the sub-microscopic level of representation of difficult topics and switching across different levels of representation.