Why Austrian students are (not) interested in chemistry education

An interest study concerning chemical content and experimental activities

Abstract

Background: Over the last decades, several international studies have addressed the issue of student interest in science and chemistry education. The findings of these studies describe the phenomenon of declining interest over the school career. However, older as well as more recent studies show that everyday references and independent experimentation can promote interest in chemistry education. Students themselves stress the importance of everyday references in chemistry education.

Purpose: Currently, there is no actual interest study that deals with the interest of Austrian students in relation to everyday references and experimental activities in chemistry education. This study aimed to contribute to the research field of interest studies in chemistry education by analyzing the interest of Austrian students in chemical content with relation to everyday references and experimental activities.

Sample/setting: A total of 621 lower (67.1 %) and upper (32.9 %) secondary school students from Austria partici-pated in this study. The students were informed on the use of their data for this study; ethical guidelines were followed. An online questionnaire was used and sent to the schools. The questionnaire was then forwarded by the schools to the students.

Design and Methods: The questionnaire consists of two parts: (1) personal data, such as gender, school level and whether the school has its own laboratory lessons for chemistry education and (2) a total of 47 items on interest in chemistry content with and without everyday references as well as interest in experimental activities and frequency of experimental activities in chemistry education and 4 items on chemistry-related self-concept. The interest in chemical content with or without everyday references was analysed descriptively and an analysis of variance was calculated. The impact of chemistry-related self-concept, gender, school grade and lesson type on the interest in chemical content with and without everyday references was analyzed using a path model and the interest in experimental activities was analyzed descriptively.

Results: The findings show that learners are significantly more interested in content with everyday references (strong effect) than in content without everyday references. Furthermore, this study showed that independent experimentation is of greatest interest for students, but at the same time occurs relatively rare in chemistry lessons. Less popular, on the other hand, are abstract activities such as formulating reaction equations in the context of experiments. Results also reveal that chemistry-related self-concept is a moderate/strong predictor for the interest in chemical content for both with and without everyday references. The other predictors (gender, school grade, lesson type) each only have a weak influence on interest in this content. However, results reveal that interest in chemistry content declines over the school career, just as other studies have previously found a declining interest in chemistry/science education.

Conclusions: The study provides new and current insights into the interest of Austrian students in chemical content with and without everyday references in chemistry education. Furthermore, the study shows which experimental activities students are most interested in and how often experimental activities occur in chemistry lessons. One way of counteracting the loss of interest could be to teach with as much of the focus on everyday life as possible, considering the interests of female and male students when choosing the everyday reference and enabling the students to experi-ment independently, preferably with reference to everyday life, as often as possible. After all, this is what summarizes the greatest interests of students in chemistry education in this study. However, further research will be required on how to counteract this loss of interest over the school career.

Keywords: interest in chemistry education, interest study, everyday references, experimental activities