New Perspectives in Science Education

Interest is an important condition for students’ learning success and achievement. Even though teachers mostly cannot influence their students’ individual interests, they can use interesting topics to stimulate situational interest in learning situations as a first step of interest genesis [1]. Creating contexts is one promising way to enhance personal relevance and everyday relations as triggers for situational interest. Using insights from different interest studies [2, 3], medicine could represent a unique intersection of topics that seem interesting for young people of all gender. Besides their interestingness, medicinal aspects offer great overlaps with important curriculum contents in chemical education. Despite the long-known potential of medicine as an interesting topic, it has only punctually been pursued further for usage in chemistry lessons away from few university level courses.

In this article, we present the process to narrow down the rather broad topic of “medicine” for chemistry education to create special medicinal contexts appropriate for different school levels, namely “breaking and healing bones”, “blood circulation” and “wound dressings and closure”. Further, we address the above-mentioned research gap by constructing a survey instrument for measuring situational interest in selected medicinal aspects that are directly connected with curriculum contents. All three contexts are joint together as the bigger theme “injury, blood and wounds”. For measuring students’ interest structures, we put together an online questionnaire based on studies concerning the interestingness of learning contexts in chemistry education [4, 5] and consisting of three different parts: (1) analysing individual interest in chemistry and the chemistry-related self-concept, (2) introducing students to our medicinal contexts using self-made videos, and (3) measuring the interestingness and the familiarity of the presented context as well as analysing potential interest in learning using these contexts. Having analysed the data from the pilot study of our questionnaire, we draw first conclusions on how interesting our contexts are for students and how to optimise the instrument for the main survey.