Investigating and studying the prospective chemistry teachers' understanding about the concepts of electrochemistry and comparing the results obtained with the high school students’ results

Studying the understanding of teacher students about scientific concepts is more essential than the study of students' perceptions, as a perceived misunderstanding among the teachers affects the student's understanding. The aim of this study was to determine the chemistry teacher students' understanding about some concepts of electrochemistry and comparing the result obtained with the outcomes for the students. The sample of the study was 47 chemistry teacher students of Farhangian University. In order to identify the misconceptions, a questionnaire containing seven questions about some of the most important concepts related to electrochemistry have been used. The test was conducted under normal class conditions without previous warning. In order to evaluate their understanding and to extract their misconceptions, student’s responses were analyzed statistically and descriptively after data collection. The results obtained indicated that, the level of understanding of teacher students' is very high in comparison with students, but some of them have the same misconceptions as high school students have. Through interviews with some of these teacher students, some causes of misconceptions were identified.