Various frameworks have been developed to address the essence of chemistry and chemical thinking. The importance of learning chemical ways of thinking is widely recognized.
Furthermore, the work analyses the challenges that can be encountered when using everyday examples in teaching, and demonstrates that student-discovered examples of chemical systems can be a powerful method for generating meaningful and relevant ways to introduce scientific phenomena in STEM education. Providing a suitable experimental platform for developing and re-evaluating their knowledge allows the students to reasonably independently re-conceptualize their thinking toward a more coherent view of the surrounding world and the related scientific models. The operationally simple extraction experiment and the accompanying questionnaire revealed that while students have several chemical misconceptions arising from the use of superficial everyday examples, they have all the necessary knowledge for developing a deeper understanding of chemistry. To address the identified challenges, we introduce a simple and effective extraction experiment which focuses on building a deeper conceptual understanding of extraction processes. These challenges were identified based on a survey of upper secondary school textbooks and verified through a questionnaire study. We discuss the pedagogical challenges associated with the current way of introducing extraction in upper secondary school chemistry education. Such use of multi-process examples may easily result in a cognitive overload, and as a result the student either cannot develop a conceptual understanding on what an extraction process actually is, or develops a misconception based on their interpretation. With the development of misconceptions being an ever-present challenge in chemical education (Barker 2000, Barke et al 2009, Sarıtaş et al 2021, it is not hard to foresee confusion arising when brewing coffee is presented as the example of an extraction, even though the most clearly observable sub-processes in a coffee machine are the audible boiling of the water, and filtration with the filter paper, which is supplied by the user manually. This further highlights the issue that arises from teaching extraction using macro-level (Johnstone 1991) examples: in macroscopic examples, which consist of multi-process systems, it is hard for students to comprehend and separate which process is actually relevant for the discussion, and how the different processes are interconnected. Finally, we provide an “exemplary activity” on the topic of gases based on this approach, and we evaluate its suitability in terms of some well-established ideas in didactics of science/chemistry. We propose a model-based approach that recognises the continuum between empirical and theoretical, descriptive and explanatory in chemical concepts. Our literature review of chemistry education shows that a focus of attention for the macro-submicro interplay problem is put in the relations between observations and inferences we examine such relations with the aid of ideas from the philosophy of science and the specific philosophy of chemistry. Incorrectly moving between these two levels is regarded as the cause of many misconceptions in school chemistry, and several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to remedy those misconceptions. The aim of this article is to propose a didactical approach to establish appropriate relations between different kinds of chemical knowledge and explanations at the macro and the submicro level.