Herunata Herunata, Ima Rosyida, Oktavia Sulistina, Husni Wahyu Wijaya
Learning chemistry not only aims to gain knowledge but also to find out conceptual understanding using chemistry representations, including in chemistry equilibrium topic. In the learning process, it presented aspects related to basic concepts, various representations, the meaning of basic concepts with their representations, and interpretations of various representations, named representational competence. It means that the learning needs to assist in increasing student's conceptual understanding and representation competence. Therefore, the general purpose of this research intends to describe and find out the relationship between conceptual understanding, chemistry representations and representational competencies on that topic. This research used a correlational method and involved 132 students of XI grade at one of the schools in Malang city, Indonesian. This data was collected through the Equilibrium Conceptual Understanding Test Instrument (ECUTI), Equilibrium Representations Test Instrument (ERTI), and Equilibrium Representational Competence Test Instrument (ERCTI) using the Google form application. The results showed that ECUTI was by 55.14%, ERTI was by 63.46% and ERCTI was by 68.08% with a coefficient correlation of 0.774 which showed a strong relationship between conceptual understanding, chemical representation and representational competency. In conclusion, the common understanding of the concept in term of student content is lower than the representation and representational competence. This research indicates that comprehending the concept of equilibrium cannot be understood in content alone, but it also requires a representation. The use of good representations to understanding the chemical concept can be improving the representational competence in understanding of chemical concept as a whole. © 2021 Author(s).
Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Negeri, Malang, Indonesia
