Toward a Multidimensional Understanding: Computational Chemistry and TPACK Framework in Elucidating the Hydrolysis of Methyl Acetate under Alkaline Conditions

The hydrolysis of esters under alkaline conditions represents a core and challenging topic in high school chemistry education. Students often struggle to achieve a deep understanding due to the disconnection among macroscopic phenomena, microscopic mechanisms, and symbolic representations. To address the limitations of traditional teaching methods in visually presenting microscopic reaction mechanisms, this study, taking the hydrolysis of esters under alkaline conditions as an example, develops an innovative instructional model that integrates the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework with computational chemistry (CC). Based on density functional theory (DFT) investigations on the hydrolysis of methyl acetate, methyl chloroacetate, and methyl dichloroacetate under alkaline conditions, an inquiry-based teaching approach grounded in the bridge-in, objective, preassessment, participatory learning, postassessment, summary (BOPPPS) teaching model was designed. By effectively transforming CC results, including molecular structures, energy diagrams, and charge distributions, into instructional materials, the approach helps students build a cognitive framework that bridges macroscopic phenomena and microscopic mechanisms. The results of pre- and postassessments based on this instructional design show that students significantly improved their abilities in two fundamental dimensions: describing reaction mechanisms and analyzing energy diagrams. Improvements were also observed in areas such as interpreting charge distributions, explaining reaction irreversibility, comprehensive discrimination, and metacognitive strategy awareness. This study provides a practical pathway for integrating the pedagogical value of CC─using visual evidence to support abstract concept understanding─into high school chemistry classrooms.