NEWS AND INFORMATION

The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether and how the quality of students’ explanations of chemical phenomena was affected by changing the method of giving the question and answer, respectively, between the spoken and written formats. It also focused on these effects for different questions and different students. Two experiments used the same population of first‐year university students who attempted the same set of questions, variously presented and answered in each of the four different ways of combining these two methods of questioning and answering. From the results, it was concluded that, for these students and questions, there was no observable difference between the performance of the students using any of these combinations of formats.