The Effect of Systemic Synthesis Questions [SSynQs] on Students’ Performance and Meaningful Learning in Secondary Organic Chemistry Teaching

The influence of instructional method on students' achievement and mental effort: Systemic versus traditional approach in secondary organic chemistry teaching

“…Or, it could be said that [SSynQs] have positively affected the balance between the experimental group students' mental effort and achievement. These findings seem to confirm the instructional effect of [SSynQs] previously addressed by Hrin et al (2015aHrin et al ( , 2015b.…”

“…The following results (Table 1) confirmed that the students who were learning with [SSynQs] showed significantly better learning achievement that those who were taught by traditional method, when we examined students' achievement in conventional, linear questions, [LQs], and systemically oriented questions, [SSynQs]. These findings were in accordance with studies in which systemic diagrams (Fahmy & Lagowski, 2002Golemi et al, 2014;Hrin et al, 2014) and [SSynQs] (Hrin et al, 2015a(Hrin et al, , 2015b were evaluated in chemistry educational process as effective instructional tools.…”

“…The empirical findings emphasized that systemic questions could be characterized as effective, valid and reliable tools for assessing students' meaningful understanding (Hrin et al, 2015a;Vachliotis et al, 2011Vachliotis et al, , 2014 and systems thinking (Vachliotis et al, 2014) in organic chemistry domain. The latest study within systemic approach has considered the application of systemic questions as instructional tools, including one additional variable -students' cognitive load (Hrin et al, 2015b).…”

“…Systemic questions were presented as new assessment schemas within systemic approach. The main differences between systemic questions and systemic diagrams, as their precursors, are in the number of concepts included in their structures, as well as in their application (Hrin et al, 2015a). As indicated previously, systemic diagrams have been constructed as instructional tools, and as such, they possess relatively large number of concepts.…”

“…Respectively, [SSynQs] could be successfully solved only if students have fully constructed meaningful understanding of concept. Systemically oriented questions have been previously characterized as valid and reliable tools for assessing students' meaningful understanding (Hrin et al, 2015a;Vachliotis et al, 2011Vachliotis et al, , 2014, so it is understandable that students find it more difficult to solve [SSynQs] than [LQs] which could be often solved by applying rote learning (Hrin et al, 2015a;Vachliotis et al, 2011Vachliotis et al, , 2014. …”