Chemistry education is also referred to as chemical education. It is an area of active research involving both the disciplines of chemicals and education. Chemistry education blends both teaching and learning of chemistry in schools, universities and colleges. The main goal of chemistry education is to enable educators or teachers to be in a position to understand so as to best teach chemistry. On the other hand chemistry education enables students to best learn and understand chemistry too. This is made possible by use of different teaching and learning modes. These learning modes include laboratory experiments, live demonstrations and lectures. It is also not unheard of to perform lab tests on rust remover products for the purpose of observing corrosive oxidation evaporate.

There’re four philosophical perspectives that describe how chemistry education is carried out. First perspective is where teachers, instructors or professors responsible for teaching chemistry, define how to teach chemistry by themselves. This means that they teach chemistry according to their own understanding and the research they have conducted. This form of teaching is known as practitioner’s perspective. The second perspective consists of faculty members, instructors and chemistry educators. This is a self-identified group that doesn’t take primary interest in any particular area of chemistry but rather contributes to chemistry education through book writing, essays, making observations and suggestions and presentations.

In chemistry education the third perspective is known as chemical education research abbreviated as. Those practicing chemical education research, study other practitioners teaching practices and do not focus on or create their own. They adopt methods and theories practiced in pre-college science research, apply them in schools’ education and use them to understand the problems that were met in post-secondary. Quantitative and qualitative data collection methods are used in chemical education research. Qualitative methods comprise of observations, interviews, journaling and other social science researches while quantitative methods basically comprise of data collection that has been analyzed through different statistical methods.

The forth perspective in chemistry education is referred to as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). SoTL is a developing method in post-secondary education. It advances on the practice of teaching students by sharing their own researches in public. The main methods of research used by SoTL are questionnaires and surveys, observational research, interviews and focus groups, reflection and analysis, content analysis of text, quasi-experiment, case studies and secondary analysis of existing data. The main practice for SoTL is based on the five major divisions of chemistry that are inorganic chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and analytical chemistry.