New Perspectives in Science Education

A main learning outcome of chemistry education for students at school is gaining competences regarding realising problems, developing hypotheses for solving these problems and therefore planning experiments for verifying or falsifying these hypotheses. In the field of gaining scientific practical skills regarding problem solving abilities possible tasks are inquiry-based experiments. Students have to solve a problem by using self-developed experiments. For developing pedagogical content knowledge a good content knowledge is necessary [1]. Bearing this in mind, teachers have to have scientific practical skills to engage students in investigations, discoveries, inquiries and problem-solving activities.

A main element of university chemistry studies are laboratory classes. During these mostly fixed “recipes” are used. The students won’t get much encouraged to think about these experiments and won’t develop ideas of nature of science and scientific investigations. Thus there is a demand for implementing inquiry-based learning in chemistry teacher education at university [2]. This research project puts open inquiry-based experimental tasks in all parts of chemistry studies (i.e. general, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry).

In this contribution we present exemplary learning settings which have been implemented in the chemistry curriculum at the University of Flensburg to foster future chemistry teachers´ open inquiry competences in science.