A Study on a Teacher's and Students' Perceptions of Learning Difficulties of the Chemical Bond Unit of the Chemistry II

The purpose of this study was to explore high school teacher's and students' perceptions of learning difficulties of the 'chemical bond' unit of the Chemistry II in the 7th national curriculum. The participants in this study were consisted of a teacher and his students(85) from the Chemistry II classrooms: they all answered to the questionnaire, and then some students and the teacher were interviewed individually. The results showed that there were big differences between the teacher's and his students' perceptions of 1) the most difficult unit for understanding; 2) concepts they learned; and 3) the most difficult concept for understanding in the classroom. Students thought that electro-negativity unit was the most difficult to understand while teacher thought molecular structure unit was the hardest unit to teach. And teacher taught all 32 subjects of chemical bond unit to students, but some students could not remember they learned all of them. Most difficult parts for students to understand were 'Coulomb force' and 'dipole moment', while the most difficult part for the teacher to teach was 'the conceptual difference between atomic bond and intermolecular force'. The reasons caused the students' learning difficulties were analyzed and discussed based on the interview data, and then further study was presented.