Verticality in chemistry teaching: the use of ICT for improving concepts comprehension

The progressive reduction of experimental science teaching hours (at least in Italy) pushes towards drastic choices as regard to the teaching contents a nd focuses the attention on the main concepts and model of a discipline: this may represent a good chance for innovating the teaching contents as well as the didactic devices and the learning context (i.e. the way to manage the teacher-learner-knowledge relation). It is a matter of managing the teaching activity in order to: 1. Assure a ‘didactic strategy continuity’ between first and second school cycles as well as within each cycle. To this regard, an transdisciplinary spiral path able to tackle some cru cial points of the scientific knowledge through a gradual introduction of more and more sophisticated and abstract concepts and models appears suitable. 2. Replace the frontal teaching with a teaching strategy based on problem-situations, that focuses on selected topics that may be tackled in-depth. This implies learning to be conceived as a social and cooperative process. While adopting this perspective, the authors show an example of how information technologies may help to enhance the effectiveness of didactic devices and learning contexts. They discuss three learning situations dealing with the phenomenon of dissolution and the building up of the concept of concentration, at three distinct level of conceptualization.