Educator Dr Karla Hylton believes students flunk chemistry because of fear; a fear fed by a lack of understanding of the subject’s basic concepts.

But it’s a phenomenon she hopes to reverse with her just- released workbook Complete Chemistry for Caribbean High School Students.

Hylton is the founder of Bio and Chem Tutoring and a Career & Education columnist.

“I want to remove the fear of chemistry from our student population, and I want to encourage our students to like the subject. Many students fail it, but this book will help them by removing the fear and help to build their confidence,” Hylton told the Jamaica Observer.

She said that students fear and eventually do poorly in the subject because they do not understand the basic concepts of the science.

“To be honest, I believe that there is a problem in teaching chemistry. A lot of my students come in without knowing the basics of chemistry at all. You know how when you’re learning to write you have to learn your ABCs? A lot of times I find that some teachers just skip over the basics. Maybe they want them to read it in the textbook, I don’t know; there is some mystery in my head as to what teachers expect. But, to me, it is important to clarify and spend some time on the basics and make sure that it is fully understood so that you can build on that,” she said.

“If you didn’t understand how to write ABCs, you’re not going to understand it. And chemistry is abstract, so you have to understand the most basic stuff like the atom, and matter, before you can jump to what are chemical reactions, etc. Many times students don’t understand the basics and then they just don’t like the subject and get discouraged. They just don’t put in the effort anymore. We want to change that.

“Sometimes they don’t understand the application of chemistry and how chemistry is all around them. Everything, such as writing with your pen or pencil, involves some sort of chemistry,” she explained.

Dr Hylton also takes issue with what she described as a dearth of practice material for chemistry students.

“In my tutoring practice I found that students were lacking practice. It is a fairly long syllabus and teachers don’t have the time to actually do a lot of practice, and, you know, practice is what helps you remember. And looking in the book stores at the time, I didn’t know of any workbooks available for chemistry. So I decided to put pen to paper and start to form one myself,” she said of her reason for putting together the workbook.

“Your brain learns by those neural connections, and therefore the more those connections are firing, the greater the chance of you actually remembering what you have learnt,” she continued.

Hylton holds a PhD in biotechnology from the University of the West Indies, and prior to her now five years of private tutoring, she lectured in microbiology and environmental science at the University of Technology, Jamaica for 10 years. She also worked as a researcher at the Scientific Research Council.

She described the workbook as comprehensive, and said it is structured to build students’ confidence in the subject by starting simple before moving into the more difficult concepts. It caters to the beginner chemistry student in third form to the advanced fifth former.

“First, my students would be like, ‘This is too hard. I don’t want to do this’ and so on, but when they do it they would say ‘I didn’t think of the questions this way’, and so on because it was helping them. Of course, all students in general wouldn’t be willing, but when they do it, they find that it’s beneficial,” she told Career & Education.

“I’m hoping that every high school will have it on their book list because I feel like it will be invaluable to their chemistry students,” Hylton noted.