The Periodic Table as a Tool for Teaching the Nature of Science

Teaching the connectedness of relationships among elements in the Periodic Table is often an overwhelming task, and can result in shallow student understanding. This article contains a series of activities that evoke student prior knowledge about classification, leads them to discover periodicity and other relationships among the characteristics of elements, and extends their knowledge into other disciplines such as creative writing and art. The activities structure an effective learning environment because the foundation of understanding lies in the nature of science, utilizing process skills, content knowledge, and the history of science in order to teach conceptual understanding on multiple levels. The resultant understanding of the multi-dimensional patterns of the characteristics of the elements gained by engaging with these activities allows students to use the periodic table as a tool for predicting compounds and writing reaction equations. Based on the authors' experiences, 14- to 18-year-old students who have participated in these activities have been able to identify valence electrons effectively and correctly pair elements in ionic bonds. Given the formula, students were also adept in drawing dot diagrams of covalent compounds because they understood the meaning of the position of an element in the periodic table.