Analysis of conceptual understanding of solutions and titration among Rwandan secondary school students

This study aimed to examine the effect of three teaching approaches: The traditional teaching method, Teacher based demonstration experiment (TBDE), and the Student hands-on experiment (SHE), on students' conceptual understanding of solutions and titration. The data were collected using a chemistry achievement test (CAT) comprising of 30 multiple-choice questions, prepared according to four levels of Bloom's taxonomy, including remembering, understanding, applying, and analyzing. The results reveal that TTM alone could help students attain conceptual understanding in the lower-level knowledge domain and showed a slight improvement in the application and analysis level. At the same time, a great misconception was observed in the level of understanding. On the other hand, the combination of TTM with laboratory experiments either by TBDE or SHE improved students' conceptual understanding of the first three learning domains better than TTM alone. Supplementation of laboratory experiments also improved students' percentage scores for questions that looked difficult before intervention. The current study recommends that chemistry teachers should combine TTM with a laboratory experiment to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, despite the positive impact of laboratory experiments in the first three learning domains, their effectiveness seemed to be reduced at the level of analysis. This finding is because the level of inquiry was low. After all, students had to follow the experiment protocol prepared by the teacher. Therefore, we recommend further studies to explore the effect of inquiry-based learning laboratories on students' conceptual understanding of solutions and titration.