It’s the Situation That Matters: Affective Involvement in Context-Oriented Learnin Tasks - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 156

Fig. 2 Structure of a
context-oriented task in
relation to a student
engaged in a learning
activity; cf. Van Vorst et al.
( in press )
Taking the relation between a person and an object of learning into consideration
not only means assigning an affective but also a cognitive component to the interest
construct because the object of interest might be related to a specific content-related
task in the classroom.
In order to satisfy the assumptions of the person-object relation of interest, we
perceive the cbl task as a situation and its interrelation to chemistry content (see
Fig. 2 ). The situation can be defined as a non-content-related trigger to catch student
interest. It is provided in a learning task in the form of a written or oral story to
which content knowledge can be related. Situation and content knowledge consti-
tute the whole task and are considered the object of learning that affects the student.
3 Empirical Evidence on Affective Dimensions in cbl
Investigating the affective response of students to context-based instruction has
confirmed that context-based learning triggers positive affect. Considering the
studies included in the two major reviews on cbl in science education (Bennett
et al., 2007 ) and chemistry education ( ¨ ltay & Calik, 2012 ), students learning
chemistry content within contexts of their life-world profit with regard to the
affective dimension of learning. Although there is consent among science education
researchers about this positive effect, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the
differentiated aspects in cbl that generate it. Therefore, we do not intend to argue
whether cbl is capable of raising positive affect but will examine the determinants
that lead to its emergence.
Taking a closer look at the studies included in the reviews mentioned above, it
becomes obvious that general conclusions should only be drawn on cautious
grounds. Although the phrase “attitude towards chemistry” seems to be the most
commonly used descriptive phrase in order to describe student affect, authors also