Chemistry experiment training for science high school teachers toward active learning approach

Mahidol Wittayanusorn School (MWITS), the first specialized science high school in Thailand, has initiated a number of teacher training workshops to provide the special knowledge and the specific teaching strategies in various academic fields for science high school teachers and other interested participants around the country. As a role of the training organizers, we demonstrate here with the chemistry experiment workshop for 18 chemistry teachers from different schools in Thailand. The aim of this research is to enhance knowledge and teaching skills implementing with the active learning approach for the participant teachers. More knowledge and more understanding in the teaching techniques of the chemistry experiments toward active learning were anticipated as the dependent variables of this project. According to the online discussions with the participant teachers along with the survey results from their students prior to the training, six chemistry experiments were selected to use for the workshop activities: (1) solubility of the ionic compounds, (2) colligative properties of solutions, (3) limiting reagents in stoichiometry, (4) laws of gases, (5) determination of gas constant and (6) electrochemical cells. In the training workshop, all participants were divided into groups of three and assigned specific roles: experimental manager, experimental recorder and experimental analyst. The roles were rotated from the experiment to the experiment. To force cooperation, each group received only one copy of the problem sheet avoiding a parallel play situation in which each participant would try to work the problems independently. During the experiments, each group was asked to reflect on their group process skills by answering some process-related questions. The participants were also invited to participate in the advisory session to discuss on the process of the experiments as well as their achieving knowledge. The instrument which was used to collect the data is the 3-2-1 assessment questionnaire (3 things they have learned from the workshop, 2 things they want to improve for the workshop, 1 thing they will use for further apply to their teaching). They were also asked to provide a self-evaluation grade of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. From the assessments, several positive comments were obtained from all of the 3-2-1 assessment questionnaires of the participants and the result of the average evaluation grade is 4.50 with the standard deviation of 0.61. As a result, it can be possibly concluded that the achieving knowledge of all participants from the workshop is efficiently applicable to the active learning approach for the chemistry classes at the high school level.