Secondary students' understanding of the relationship between physical change and chemical bonding

Making the distinction between physical and chemical changes depends largely upon whether students describe them via reorganization of particles and/or chemical bonds. Grounded in constructivist view of knowledge, the present study aimed to find out the ways in which Turkish students think about the relationship between physical changes and chemical bonding after receiving the conventional teaching. A questionnaire consisted of open ended questions was used as an assessment tool. It was distributed to 11 th grade science students (n= 293). They completed the questionnaire right after their conventional teaching on chemical bonding. Questions presented a number of daily life issues concerning physical changes and then asked for explanations about the changes occur in chemical bonds of the matter under the physical transformation. Findings indicated that most of the students could spot the change as physical in nature. Yet, only the half could draw the link between transformations of matter and the changes in its chemical bonds. Findings also showed that most of the students used the reversibility criterion in order to distinguish between physical and chemical change and that the success of applying the criterion increased by the familiarity of the event.