Augmented reality for chemistry education to promote the use of chemical terminology in teacher trainings

Chemistry as a whole is divided into three levels. The macroscopic level describes real, observable phenomena of the material world. The submicroscopic level focuses on particles. The representative level includes pictorial and symbolic representations to visualize substance in its nature. Students often have problems separating these levels and conceptually transfer each of the three levels to the other. Therefore, teachers need to use chemical terminology correctly when teaching the substance-particle concept. Augmented reality (AR) connects the real and virtual worlds. The observer physically moves in a real environment that integrates virtual elements. This can be effective for learning when chemical processes that are invisible are made visible. The simultaneous presentation should avoid split attention and offers new possibilities to interactively deal with multiple external representations ((M)ER). The question arises whether AR has a positive effect on the use of technical language. With an AR app on the tablet and on the hololens, chemical processes of a real experiment are represented by AR visualizations. In this study, the chemistry terminology of chemistry teachers (N = 30) was captured using a pre-post survey. Each test includes five tasks elaborated by thinking aloud. Therefore, the AR app was piloted. The thinking-aloud protocols to acquire the use of the chemical terminology are evaluated in MAXQDA.