Characteristics of meaningful chemistry education - The case of water quality

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of how to involve students in meaningful chemistry education by a proper implementation of three characteristics of meaningful: a context, a need-to-know approach and attention for student input. The characteristics were adopted as solution strategies for problematic features of traditional school chemistry. Their implementation was expected to result in the students being generally motivated, seeing the point of every activity in the teaching-learning process and having the feeling that their input matters. As one module is object of study, the central, situated question of this research has been: What is an adequate teaching-learning process in a module about judging water quality for initial chemistry education (students: 14-15) which properly embodies the three characteristics of meaningful: a motivating context, a proper need to know and a proper attention for student input?

This research question has been addressed in three research cycles with three successive, increasingly adequate, versions of the design in a process called developmental research (Lijnse, 1995). Each research cycle led to new ideas and operationalisations and to a new version of the design. The project has resulted in:

1. An exemplary design heuristic for other modules that aim at meaningful chemistry education. The design heuristic involves directions for designing an instructional version of (in this case) the authentic practice of judging water quality in which the students' intuitive notions of the characteristic procedure of this practice is used to induce so-called content related motives amongst students (Klaassens, 1995). 2. The idea of functional embeddedness is the central principle in designing a teaching-learning process that properly embodies a context, a need to know approach and attention for student input. Functional embeddedness as a design principle means that student activities are to be embedded in an overall purpose in such a way that students realise beforehand how the activities are going to contribute to this (their) overall purpose. This result is relevant in two ways. Firstly, the idea of functional embeddedness is a more directive design principle than the three separate characteristics of meaningful. Secondly, the principle of functional embeddedness brings certain didactical issues to the fore that are generally recognised in science education research and also connects them. One of these issues is for example how to functionally embed the top-down established learning goals of a teaching learning process in the interests and goals of the students to achieve that the students become motivated and see the point of getting involved in the teaching learning process. Another issue is how to design activities that are for students functionally embedded in their overall purpose.