Effectiveness of Chemical Equilibrium-Based Pedagogical Treatments in Improving Students’ Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis Study

OpenAlex · İngilizce

Abstract Despite acknowledging the complementary role of chemical equilibrium-based pedagogical treatments on students’ academic performance, the related science education literature has not examined their practical effectiveness and significance via a meta-analysis method. Therefore, this study intends to meta-analytically explore their effectiveness in improving students’ academic performance. It included 55 studies (k) from 51 unique sources. The results of the meta-analysis showed that the overall effect-size (Hedges’ g = 1.028) fell into the large effect. This means that the treatments are more effective in enhancing students’ academic performance of chemical equilibrium than the controlled ones. Nevertheless, the variability in the effect-sizes revealed the importance of the treatment types and educational contexts. Also, the results indicated that the moderator variables were statistically non-significant ( p > 0.05) but categorically played a crucial role at predicting the students’ academic performance through the treatments. Given the descriptive findings, the current meta-analysis offers the following individual moderator levels to better teach and measure the topic “chemical equilibrium”: university (for educational level), inquiry-based learning (for type of treatment), open-ended question (for question type) and teacher (for practitioner). Of course, chemistry teachers and science educators should take into consideration the role of educational contexts in learning chemical equilibrium, while deciding the type of treatment to teach it.