Successful Experiences and Development of Key Competences in Chemistry Education: the Italian Context

As often teachers underline, textbooks are an essential tool and a good point of reference for students, but they are not sufficient to teach chemistry in a significant way. For this reason, teachers often look for sources from which to get updates on scientific knowledge, but also on teaching methodologies and on successful experiences. These considerations became even more valuable in 2012, when the New National Guidelines of the Italian school system established the framework of key competences for lifelong learning, defined by the European Parliament, as the reference horizon to work towards. The teaching for competences made essential to renew the teaching of disciplines, especially of sciences, away from the previous transmissive teaching and focusing on the action” in situation” of the student. The ”Chemistry Is All Around Network” project is working to help teachers to update their teaching methodology. The project portal has a database of successful experiences to teach chemistry and provides numerous digital teaching resources, some of them tested in classroom. As an example, the testing of a site dedicated to the periodic table of elements, performed involving 200 students of secondary school, is reported in the second part of this paper.