Identifying conceptions of the covalent bond: an analysis from a systematic review

The covalent bond is a classical topic in science education because it is fundamental to a considerable number of other concepts and by its ability to interpret several chemical phenomena. However, the process of learning this concept presents some difficulties discussed here. This article brings together the conceptions related to the covalent bond, identified, and reported from other studies, to find similarities and to organize what is known about the topic in epistemological themes. In this paper, it was conducted a systematic review using 3 databases, reaching more than 200 reports, and classified 253 sentences of misconceptions in 7 epistemological themes. The main contribution of this article is the classification of misconceptions into themes, which enables teachers and researchers to easily identify a topic considering its complexity. This review shows different misconceptions over the same topic, how misinterpretations can appear over all the models and theories related to the covalent bond, heterogeneity of school levels with the same misconception and mixing of theoretical foundations. Finally, we claim that the knowledge of this wide sight can be especially important to further lesson/unity planning, studies, and understanding of how to make a better transition between one topic to another.