TEACHING CHROMATOGRAPHY IN SECONDARY SCHOOL - AN INVESTIGATION CONCERNING GRADE, CONTEXT, CONTENT, EXPERIMENTS AND MEDIA

This investigation focuses on how one of the best established and most efficient methods for the separation of substances – chromatography – is taught in secondary school. A questionnaire-based study with teachers (N=76) was used to get a first glance at the situation in schools. The results show that various chromatographic techniques (PC, TLC, GC, HPLC) are taught in secondary school using different context settings. All teachers use paperchromatography as a students‘ experiment analyzing e.g. colour pens in 7th grade. A far less amount of teachers cover more complex techniques such as gas chromatography e.g. in 12th grade. A detailed insight was attained by analyzing 37 chemistry lessons of 18 classes in 7th grade. It could be shown that a broad variety of experiments, remarkable differences in the use of scientific concepts to explain how chromatography works and in the application of media occure.