Parallel Universes: Education Research and Chemistry Teaching

Over the past few decades there has been a huge research effort investigating aspects of the teaching and learning of science and there now are many specialist education and science education journals, dedicated conferences and symposia. Almost all such forum's are aimed at education researchers. But is there any real attempt to pass on the lessons learned from such a corpus of research into the teaching community? There are some journals that purport to achieve such an aim but in our view such journals rather than producing articles about research in chemical education, report teaching tips, and/or descriptions/assertions of 'what I found to work in my classroom'? In this article we attempt to address this issue for tertiary chemistry education. We will begin with an overview of science education research with an emphasis on chemical education. Our aim here is to summarize the broad themes that have come from such research. Next we look at some important issues facing tertiary chemistry educators and attempt to summarize what we think education research has to say to the tertiary chemistry educator, illustrating this message with an example from our own research. We conclude this article by presenting our views as to how tertiary chemistry educators can work together with education researchers to improve teaching and learning.