Supervisors info:
Μεθενίτης Κωνσταντίνος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής τμήματος Χημείας ΕΚΠΑ
Μαυρομούστακος Θωμάς, Καθηγητής ΕΚΠΑ
Παρασκευοπούλου Πατρίνα, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
Chemistry education helps students to become chemically literate citizens who will be
able to: acquire and use chemical information, use chemical knowledge in everyday life,
decode scientific information, use some of the tools and the methods of Chemistry and
in addition to have interest and appreciation for Chemistry.
In this thesis we study the ability of high school students to use chemical information
from consumer product labels, based on their pre-existing knowledge, but also during
the teaching of the respective modules. After a literature review, tools were developed
and the study was carried out from October 2018 to May 2019, in a sample of 43
teachers and 43 students of the 10th grade, following a mixed design that combined the
collection and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. The results of the study
emerged from the processing of our data with the help of the Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences. The reliability of our research, which emerged from the first
questionnaire with the 35 proposals for recognition of chemical information on labels, is
considered very satisfactory with a Cronbach reliability factor of 0.84 for the whole
sample. The chemical information on the consumer products labels was divided into
three categories: a) the «immediately recognizable information» recognized in very
large percentages by our students, b) «information product of cognitive processing»
with small percentages of utilization before teaching, and considerable improvement
after teaching , c) the «information illustrations» that were interpreted by the students
with great success. In conclusion, it was found that while students initially had difficulty
interpreting and using labels after their experiential approach, there was significant
improvement.
