Afraid of Chemistry? The Subject is Not to Blame Perhaps

New Delhi – It is as common as a classroom in every corner of the world. One of the teachers is standing in front of a blackboard, sketching hexagonal lattices and writing down complicated equations related to moles and valency. Students in the desks gaze into nothingness. Others look puzzled; others do not seem to take any interest; others are actually terrified.

To numerous generations, chemistry has been given the name of one of the most difficult and frightening subjects in the school program. Many students drop it as soon as they get an opportunity, and they are convinced that they do not have the necessary intellectual capability.

However, there is a new powerful study that disrupts this long-held belief. Fear of students encountered in studying chemistry, also known as chemophobia, is perhaps not the reason for the subject matter. Instead, it is probably one of the symptoms of the way the content is presented.

The Roots of Chemophobia

What is it that makes Chemistry so scary? Theorists argue that hate is rarely directed toward the actual objects of nature. And what is more, chemical reactions form the basis of life, cooking, and the environment, and are inherently interesting. The interruption becomes evident when the manifested reality is translated to the classroom.

Abstract concepts play a very crucial role in chemical education. The students are right away flooded with symbolic representations, mathematical formulas, and a new vocabulary that appears to be a foreign language. In a case where the student is unable to relate the symbols on the board to the outside world, the subject becomes arbitrary and punitive, which acts as a psychological barrier.

This being the opposite creates a psychological barrier. Students start to consider the discipline as dangerous, overly challenging, and, worst of all, as unrelated to their everyday life. As soon as this fear is established, this motivation fades away. It is his/her own self-fulfilling prophecy: the student thinks that he/she is unable to grasp the material, stops making any efforts to grasp it, and ends up failing to grasp it.

A New Approach in Brazil

In order to determine whether this fear might be flipped, one of the research groups of the University of São Paulo in Brazil used a different approach. The team was led by Ariane Carolina da Rocha, Ana Carolina Steola, and Ana Cláudia Kasseboehmer and has carried out a study recently published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM). They just had a simple aim: chemistry had to be brought out of the textbook box and placed into the real world.

The researchers worked with high-school learners in the public schools in São Carlos. These students had no advantage in access to state-of-the-art laboratories; they were ordinary teenagers, with a lot of them living in areas that have weak scientific resources.

As opposed to the normal lecture, the students were presented with an engaging exhibition. The topic that was selected was on the Advanced Oxidation Processes. This would appear very complicated on paper, and this is the usual jargon that puts students off. However, the subject was put into perspective in the exhibition in terms of environmental protection. The students learnt how these chemical reactions would enable them to clean impure water, breaking down dangerous dyes and drugs to harmless compounds.

The Power of Tangible Science

The change that was witnessed among the students was evident. Through the use of physical models and the practical demonstration of the science, abstraction was minimized. Chemistry was no longer the series of names and personalities to be recalled for a test; it was now the means of solving a problem that concerned pollution.

The analysis utilized a psychological concept referred to as Self-Determination Theory. This theory holds that individuals need three elements to be motivated, namely autonomy (the perception of control), competence (the feeling of the ability to do things), and relatedness (the perception of belonging to others or to the world).

Traditional education news in India does not normally meet all three criteria. Students feel out of control, incompetent in cases where they can not understand the maths aspect, and feel irrelevant to their lives. On the other hand, the interactive exhibition met the three criteria. Students explored at their own velocity, noted the how and why of the reactions, and this increased their perceived competence and, best of all, felt that there exists a relationship between chemistry and the environment, and this built relatedness.

Also Read: Massive Cheating Scandal in Maharashtra Board Exams