TITLE:
Effectiveness of using B-B B-F card and guided worksheets in helping students to learn free radical substitution mechanism of alkanes.
ABSTRACT:
This study aims to enhance understanding and improve mastery of students in free radical substitution reaction mechanism of alkanes. 21 underperforming one-year science programme students and 5 chemistry lecturers of Selangor Matriculation College are involved in this study. Pre-test and questionnaire are conducted to give insight on students’ weaknesses in writing the mechanism. From the pre-test, it can be seen that students could not draw each step of the free radical substitution reaction mechanism properly, some students could not remember what reactant or intermediate involved in each step of reaction mechanism, arrows are not correctly drawn with some students have confusion on the direction, where the arrow should start and pinpoint to and intermediate(s) or/and product formed after each step of reaction mechanism are not correctly being illustrated. To overcome these problems, B-B B-F card and guided worksheets – which emphasise students’ understanding on the process and characteristics of each step of reaction mechanism are proposed. Students are exposed to the model and guided worksheets for 1.5 hours with lecturers’ guidance. Post test then will be carried out to assess students’ performance. Questionnaires will be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique in assisting students to improve their comprehension and mastery in writing the free radical substitution reaction mechanism of alkanes.
OBJECTIVE:
General objective:
To improve students’ performance in writing the free radical substitution reaction of alkanes
Specific Objectives:
- To increase students’ ability to identify bond forming or bond breaking or simultaneous bond breaking and bond forming incident taking place in each mechanistic step of free radical substitution reaction of alkanes.
- To enhance students’ ability to use arrows to depict bond breaking or simultaneous bond breaking and bond forming or bond forming incident in each mechanistic step of free radical substitution reaction of alkanes.
- To improve students’ ability to identify what intermediate or reactant to use in drawing each mechanistic step of free radical substitution reaction of alkanes.
- To improve students’ ability to draw the intermediate(s) or/ and product formed in each mechanistic step of free radical substitution reaction of alkanes.
This study involves total 21 weak students selected based on lecturers’ observation after an in-class activity (Figure 1 and 2).
Figure 1: In-class activity using PSPM standard question
Figure 2: Fill-in-the-blank type of question as one of the
in-class activities for learning free radical substitution mechanism of
alkanes.
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