Structure of matter—diagnosis of misconceptions and challenges

Teaching chemistry for chemists at universities seems easy: you have to deal with well-known textbooks of General chemistry, with Inorganic, Organic and Physical chemistry mostly in this order. Teaching chemistry education for chemistry teachers is a difficult subject there are not many textbooks, there is no special order of all topics. One suitable idea to teach chemistry education or chemistry didactics at universities is the "Pie chart" of Figure 1. Within chemistry education, many researches are talking about misconceptions of pupils at schools. A chemist has not to consider them, but the chemistry teacher should know the misconceptions to avoid them, and to find lessons to prevent from those well-known misconceptions. Therefore the topic "Learners ideas and misconceptions" is one of the biggest sectors (see Fig.1) – it may be taught as a first chapter in a lecture and is reflected in the following paper. “At last I found a lecture worth to come up early in the morning; excellent examples and experiments of teaching chemistry; now I know what chemistry education means and why it is so important for my studies; good to have the clear concept of the ‘pie chart’ from the beginning of all lectures” (Barke et. al., 2012). These comments of would-be-chemistry teachers show that the lectures of chemistry education in our Institute at University of Muenster are helping them very much for their first steps to think about teaching chemistry at school. Figure 1. Main subjects of a lecture in chemistry education, “pie chart” metaphor (Barke et. al., 2012).