Making the teaching of chemistry relevant to students’ expectations: a review

The major challenge that confronts chemistry education across the vertical curricular strata is the gap between the high demands that learning chemistry requires and the low efforts that students make partially due to the lack of the relevancy of the teaching methods. Research has indicated one of the basic factors contributing to the lack of student motivation to learning chemistry is low quality teaching methods. This paper reviews strategies to modernize authentic teaching strategies in chemistry through application of organized active teaching models, friendly presentation, utilization of models and analogies, correlation of chemical concepts with everyday life, use of school laboratory and ICT, providing continuous assessment and feedback, and use of concept maps before and after instruction. The review aims to point out ways to effective knowledge construction that can be implemented by chemistry instructors. The goal is to make chemistry teaching realistic and easy to understand in order to motivate students’ intellectual curiosity, which in turn leads to learning enhancement regardless of their career choices.