International Conference on Education in Chemistry (ICEC)
From its inception in the late 1970s, Chemical Education Research (CER) has addressed teaching and learning of chemistry at various levels. Some of the key areas of CER are students’ conceptual understanding, problem solving for meaningful learning of chemistry, history and philosophy of chemistry and its relevance for learning chemistry, use of ICT in chemistry education, role of chemistry laboratories in learning chemistry, and affective factors in students’ achievement in chemistry. The CER is a fairly established domain today.
In India, there is a growing recognition that improvements are needed in the quality of higher chemistry (science) education in the country, that is, in colleges and University Departments. The improvement efforts are directed towards two important areas: (a) updating curricula and syllabi, and (b) modernizing teaching strategies and educational delivery systems. In addition, lot of efforts are being directed at developing instructional material (including tertiary chemistry education) that is/will be available to students and teachers through national portal. All these efforts needs to be backed by Chemistry Education Research work that needs to be conducted in India. In addition, to bring desirable changes in the existing teaching -learning classroom practices, it is essential to acquaint chemistry teachers with the work done in CER and also with research-based approaches that are being implemented in other countries.
Thus, HBCSE in collaboration with Association of chemistry teachers (ACT) have initiated a conference International Conference on Education in Chemistry (ICEC). Through planned discussions and workshops relevant to chemistry in higher education, the conference hopes to offer directions for policy planners, developers of curricula and syllabi, and textbook writers in chemistry.