Much of her work is inspired by Russian psychology of learning, especially Leont'ev's activity theory. The hidden structure in school chemistry and how to escape from it. A coherent conceptual structure of the chemistry curriculum. Some concepts that are familiar to everyone in an everyday life context are also important within a scientific context. In science education such concepts are considered difficult to teach and to learn, since the same word does not mean the same thing in both contexts.
Examples are heat, work and energy, which are mutually related by the first law of ther modynamics.
Starting from an everyday life context students experience difficulties when they try to use these concepts in solving thermody namic problems. Preconceptions expressed by students working in small groups on specially designed exercises have already been analyzed. The project now focuses on creating a scientific context in which students can develop and use scientific notions of heat and work. It is considered important that students should not reject the everyday life meanings of these words but that they learn to distinguish between the scientific and the everyday life context and recognize the value of both. In most textbooks descriptions of chemical bonding are preceded by structural models of free atoms in which a nucleus is surrounded by a 'cloud' of electrons.