A Review of Research on Learning Activities Addressing the Submicroscopic Level in Chemistry

Chemistry education requires three levels or domains of knowledge to be imparted and learned: macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic. The submicroscopic level is extremely challenging for students and teachers because it cannot be observed and is accessible only via the imagination. This systematic review aims to analyze the extant literature on implementing activities designed to improve student learning at the submicroscopic level of chemistry. A total of 64 research articles were collected from the Scopus and Education Resources Information Center databases to address the focal objective of the present study. These articles were analyzed according to chemistry topics, levels of study, pedagogical approaches, and types of learning activities implemented to improve student learning at the submicroscopic level. The review results indicate that (1) numerous learning activities have been developed to enhance student learning of the submicroscopic levels of varied chemistry topics, especially those related to matter and focused primarily on high school and first-year university students; (2) such learning activities may be categorized into six types, of which experiments featuring submicroscopic representations are most utilized and can be grouped into five strategies; and (3) inquiry-based learning represents the dominant pedagogy employed to deliver diverse activities that steer students toward exploration and instigate them to comprehend particulate-level phenomena.