This study focused on grade 12 students’ understanding of reaction kinetics. A 4-tier diagnostic instrument was developed for this purpose and administered to 137 students in the main study. Findings showed that reaction kinetics is a difficult topic for these students, with a total of 25 alternative conceptions (ACs) being uncovered. Except for one AC, the other ACs uncovered have not been reported before in the literature. An interesting point emerging from this study is that nearly 70% of the ACs were obtained from questions that featured graphs. Overall, the 4-tier format for the diagnostic instrument demonstrates good utility for probing students’ understanding of reaction kinetics as well as uncovering their ACs. The confidence-related measures, which are more commonly used in the educational psychology literature, have also permitted further insights to be gained into how the students performed in the test as well as the classification of the ACs.

中文翻译：

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使用多层诊断测试来探索学生对反应动力学的另类观念的性质

这项研究侧重于12年级学生对反应动力学的理解。为此目的开发了一种四层诊断仪器，并在主要研究中对137名学生进行了管理。结果表明，对于这些学生来说，反应动力学是一个困难的话题，总共发现了25个替代概念（AC）。除了一个AC，尚未发现其他AC文献。这项研究得出的一个有趣的观点是，将近70％的AC是从具有图表特征的问题中获得的。总体而言，诊断仪器的4层格式显示出了很好的实用性，可用于探索学生对反应动力学的了解以及发现其AC。与信心有关的量度，在教育心理学文献中较为普遍，