Functional literacy
Students’ explanations to various chemical concepts were categorized as (1) wrong or meaningless answers, (2) partially correct i.e. containing some correct elements, but not accurate or complete, and (3) correct. A second phase of categorization checked whether the students’ explanation contained molecular or macro terms, and whether it included some elements of chemical language (a symbol, or a drawing of a molecule). Eventually, the assessment consisted of six categories: correct, partially correct, and wrong molecular explanation, and correct, partially correct, and wrong macro explanations. A chi2 analysis was used in order to indicate whether there is a significant difference in the distribution of answers before and after the basic course regarding each concept. Table 7 presents the percentage of students providing correct and partially answers. The percentage of wrong answers is not presented in Table 7, but it was taken into consideration in the chi2 analysis