Research studies 12, 13 suggest that one of the sources of the students’ learning difficulties in physical chemistry lies in how textbooks and teachers deal with key chemistry concepts. For example, several authors 4, 14-20 have made an inventory of university students’ misconceptions due to a poor understanding of the spontaneity concept. Some of those misunderstandings may have their origin in the way this this concept I taught.
Project 2061’s Benchmarks for Science Literacy 21 and the National Standards for Science Education 22 called for the inclusion in textbooks of terms meaningfully defined and of appropriate representation of key ideas, 23 these documents recognized the importance of textbooks and their evaluation. Thus, evaluation of Science textbooks has become an important area of research and the inconsistencies in presentation of the subjects among textbooks are a major concern for both teachers and learners.
first-year university chemistry courses are usually full of misleading formulations.