Classwide Investigation of Absolute and Relative Scaling Conceptions of Students in Introductory College Chemistry

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has outlined four themes that define science literacy; these are systems, models, constancy and change, and scale. More recently, the National Research Council has released the framework for K-12 science education that includes "Scale, Proportion, and Quantity". Scale literacy, the collection of concepts and skills that contribute to the ability of a student to move between different scale worlds, has long been of interest in education research. In chemistry, students are confronted with issues of scale in almost every aspect of their learning as they navigate the macroscopic world we live in and the submicroscopic world chemistry happens on. Unsurprisingly, previous research has shown that students have a limited understanding of scale and demonstrate a narrow range of size in which they are comfortable operating in. Before meaningful instruction can be developed to help students increase their ability in scale, research must first focus on understanding the current conceptions of scale held by students. The research presented here replicates previous work that investigated undergraduate chemistry students' absolute and relative scaling abilities in an interview setting, on a larger classwide scale.