A CASE STUDY AT BURKA SEBETA 10 TH GRADE AND BURKA, SEBETA 12TH GRADE SECONDARY SCHOOL AT SEBETA SUBCITY SHEGER CITY OROMIA ETHIOPIA.

Abstract

Chemical bonding is a topic that students commonly find abstract and problematic and for which they develop a wide range of misconceptions . Thus, chemical bonding is considered as difficult topic and students had misconception about bond polarity, intermolecular force, intramolecular force, the octet rule, conductivity, Solubility shapes and lattice energy. The purpose of this study was to identify the major misconceptions of grade 12 and 10 students’ on the chemical bonding and to identify the sources of these misconceptions. The nature of the study is a descriptive method. Participants of the study were 67 grade 12 students and 75 grade 10 students. The FTMCT was developed after their prior conceptions about the selected topics of the study were collected from students through review of related literature, observation of lessons on chemical bonding, common mistakes of focus class students during different assessment techniques (answering class tests) and individual interview questions with volunteer students. Data was collected by using FTMCT and Interview questions were employed to gather the relevant data. Data was analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Science program (SPSS). The results from SPSS (bivariate and reliability analysis) showed that average value of reliability coefficient and correlation between 1 st tier and 2nd tiers, 3 rd tiers and 4 th tiers, 2nd tier and 4 th tier were .99, .75, .68, .67 of grade 12 students and .96, .73, .79, .74, of grade10 student respectively. The significances also shown that chemistry daily experiences, text books, language difficulty and chemistry instructional methods were the major source of students’ misconception about chemical bonding. The result showed that the majority of the students had high level of misconceptions about chemical bonding. In this study the common misconceptions were identified on chemical boding which was categorized into: bond polarity, solubility, intermolecular force, intramolecular force, the octet rule, shapes, conductivity and lattice energy.