It’s the Situation That Matters: Affective Involvement in Context-Oriented Learnin Tasks - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 154

(Aikenhead, 1994 ). Especially issues in technology were highlighted by approaches
like the Dutch Project Leerpakket Ontwikkeling Natuurkunde (PLON; eng: Physics
Curriculum Development Project) (Kortland, 2005 ). In the following decades,
context-based programs, focusing more generally on the life-world of students,
sprang up like mushrooms (Nentwig & Waddington, 2005 ): programs like “Chem-
istry in the Community” (ChemCom) were established in the USA (Sutman &
Bruce, 1992 ); the “Salters Family” of cbl courses, which included courses focused
on chemistry, were developed in the UK (Campbell et al., 1994 ); and, eventually,
“Chemie im Kontext” (ChiK) was introduced in Germany (e.g., Nentwig, Demuth,
Parchmann, Gr¨sel, & Ralle, 2007 ). In these programs, a cbl environment can
generally be regarded as a student task in the chemistry classroom that directly
relates content knowledge to a nonscience-related situation within the students

'
experience. For example, students might learn about the chemical concept of
concentration and ionic bonding by being involved in a situation where the water
quality of a swimming lake is investigated (Bulte, Westbroek, De Jong, & Pilot,
2006 ). Although implemented in different ways and on the basis of different goals,
all programs unify one all-embracing assertion: students should feel comfortable
and positive towards chemistry when they learn chemistry in a context-based
environment.
Although research has confirmed this assertion in general (cf. Bennett, Lubben,
& Hogarth, 2007 ), it is assumed that the effects of cbl environments in chemistry
education rely on the specific setting in which they are enacted (Gilbert, 2006 ). The
selection of context situations for the task as well as the chosen student activity
might have a different influence on the enhancement of positive affect in students
and might thus provide a different potential for fruitful learning processes in the
domain. Therefore, this chapter aims at taking a differentiated look at cbl tasks and
their effect on certain facets of affect. The context situation students are confronted
with in the learning task and the respective underlying content knowledge are
considered as crucial factors in the enhancement of affect and are discussed with
regard to the theoretical construct of situational interest as a content-related facet of
affect.

2 The Affective Dimensions of Context-Oriented Learning

Taking a closer look at the aspects of an activity that may have the power to
enhance positive student affect, a variety of facets have to be considered: it might
be the underlying content of the task (e.g., acids and bases in chemistry), the
embeddedness of the topic (e.g., task situation), the social mode (e.g., group
activity), the openness of the task (e.g., inquiry-based), or the fit of the task
difficulty to student competence (e.g., adaptation to student needs). Thus, it is
necessary to describe the concrete situation in which learning takes place.
According to Finkelstein ( 2005 ), three levels of context have to be clearly differ-
entiated in science education in order to avoid confusion of terms: the task