Credit:
Courtesy of Ivona Macor
The American Chemical Society Committee on Nomenclature, Terminology, and Symbols (NTS) exists to advance a common language for chemistry, and one of our main goals is to educate about the effective use of representations in chemistry for all. I’ll be honest: when I hear “chemical representation,” my brain goes straight to the intimidating stuff—International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) rules, structural formulas, the kind of notation that makes some first-year undergraduate chemistry students rethink their choice of major. But some of our most consequential work is aimed at the opposite end of the spectrum: students who haven’t yet decided whether chemistry is for them. That’s the focus of a project, led by NTS member Stacey Saba, that I want to highlight.
“Consistent, well-designed representation at the K–12 level pays dividends well beyond the classroom, whether or not those students go on to careers in the sciences—and it’s a direct expression of our mission to make effective chemical representation accessible to everyone, not just specialists.”
Saba, along with fellow NTS member Will Kender and Roxanne Spencer of the American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AACT), has led the development of a K–12 chemical representation teaching kit—a set of roughly four to six resources designed to help educators teach chemical representation to students at every stage of their K–12 education.
The team members identified the concept of ionic bonding as a topic of shared interest between NTS and AACT, and the resource they’ve developed takes a clever approach: rather than a single activity for a single grade level, it spans all three of AACT’s grade bands—lower, middle, and high school —so the same core concept is reinforced as students advance. The activity itself is a puzzle-piece matching game with an introduction and wrap-up, built on AACT’s standard template. A student might first encounter ionic bonding through this format in elementary school and then meet more advanced versions of the same activity in middle school and again years later in high school, reinforcing the concept at each stage rather than treating it as a single unit to be covered once and left behind.
The team has completed drafts of worksheets for all three grade bands and is currently revising them based on feedback from teachers who have reviewed the materials. Those revisions are expected to be finished in the beginning of 2027. Once complete, the resource will be published and promoted through the AACT website, with plans in place to track its use and impact over time.
This project reflects the kind of work NTS does that doesn’t always get attention: building the foundation for how the next generation learns to represent and reason about chemistry. Consistent, well-designed representation at the K–12 level pays dividends well beyond the classroom, whether or not those students go on to careers in the sciences — and it’s a direct expression of our mission to make effective chemical representation accessible to everyone, not just specialists.
If you’re an educator, a fellow committee member, or someone simply interested in how chemical representation is taught to younger students, watch for this resource on the AACT website. If you’d like to learn more about this project or get involved with NTS more broadly, reach out to me at [email protected].
Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or ACS.
