Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
of an ice-water mixture (see E2.1) or the lowering of the boiling temperature of
water with decreasing pressure (see E2.2). After demonstrations or even
experiments carried out by the students they are likely to be more motivated to
discuss the phenomena regarding the dependence of pressure and boiling
temperatures of water, about the vapor pressure curve of water. This well-known
curve could be motivating also for older students at the stage of formal operations of
thought, but the discussed phenomena are also important for motivating even this
group of older students.
Attitudes
. Motivation can only be developed if a neutral or even positive attitude
exists to the appropriate school subject or the facts to be learned [
4
]. With a
negative attitude students would not be ready to turn to the desired situation or to
think about the offered facts.
As part of an empirical survey of attitudes in the early eighties, Heilbronner and
Wyss [
5
] asked Swiss students aged 11-15 years to paint their image of chemistry.
The pictures showed smoking industrial chimneys, contaminated rivers, tanks of
toxic chemicals with skull symbols, and animals dying in experiments. The authors
reported a very negative attitude to chemistry, given the dominance of these
negative paintings and asked: “What teacher will teach chemistry successfully if
students start with such a negative image of this subject?” [
5
] (see Chap. 8).
At the end of the nineties, Barke and Hilbing [
6
] repeated this study with German
students in the same age group. These students were also asked to express their
attitudes through painting their images of chemistry and scrutinizing them through
a questionnaire. Compared with the earlier study the attitudes had improved much:
beside some critical paintings of environmental problems students painted chemis-
try teachers doing experiments, painted explosions of hydrogen-air mixtures,
painted the name chemistry in nice colors. It is possible that a number of big
accidents in chemistry factories in the eighties caused the negative image of
Swiss students.
The attitudes of young people are also influenced positively through nice and
exciting experiments, although these may not always be used for learning chemis-
try. For this reason it is recommended to surprise the students from time to time
with a show experiment or to let students perform it themselves. There is no long-
lasting intrinsic motivation from those show experiments, but students might like
their teachers more if they perform such experiments and students may be
motivated by those persons.
Spectacular experiments alone are not sufficient for motivation - the most
beautiful effects fizzle out quickly and are devalued in our media-saturated world
through sensory overload and the effects habit quickly. Therefore, intrinsic motiva-
tion is developed more successfully if students can discover chemistry relationships
through experiments by themselves. An example for inquiry learning in organic
chemistry through networked experiments is shown with the phenomenological-
integrative network approach (PIN concept, see Chap. 9).
Student preconcepts
. As noted in Chap. 1, young people prefer their own
explanations that do not necessarily coincide with scientific concepts of today:
same substance and different properties (“red copper change to green copper”),
