Understanding the Mole Concept

The difficulties that students and educators have in understanding the mole concept are well documented. A key difficulty, the origin of Avogadro’s number is addressed.A number of activities (inspired by the philosophy of guided inquiry) represents the idea of aggregating, or accumulating entities of a substance to give one mole of that substance.
The connection between relative atomic mass and molar mass, requiring students to understand the idea that on a macroscopic scale (grams), so long as the numbers of particles of two different substances are the same, their relative mass ratio will be the same as the ratio of their relative atomic masses is also incorporated within the activities. If students can understand this, then they should understand why we use Avogadro’s number, and what motivated its discovery.