Summary of dissertation project Individual learning with cooperative experimental tasks in chemistry teaching at secondary level I

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What?

The aim of the project is to establish and describe key principles for measures and strategies for individual support in experimentation in chemistry.

To this end, the project examines the use of the cooperative experimentation tasks (German only) (Rumann, 2005; Walpuski, 2006; Wahser, 2007; Knobloch, 2011; Emden, 2011, Habig, 2017) on different topics. Here, individual learning paths and difficulties are analysed and then related to learning requirements and learning conditions.

Why?

The ever more diverse learning requirements among pupils (cf. the PISA study 2015 and the IQB comparison of federal states 2012) have meant that teaching and learning have become a complex area of activity within the field of school education. In this context, the implementation of individual support is often discussed and demanded, not least against the background of inclusive school development. Above all, open and cooperative forms of learning with a high degree of alignment between individual learning requirements and learning opportunities are described as particularly important for the implementation of individual support in subject teaching (Helmke, 2013; Klieme & Warwas, 2011). Even though initial findings on differentiation and individual support in chemistry teaching are already available for individual topics (e.g., Puddu, 2017, Anus, 2015; Kallweit, 2015; Groß, 2013), little is known so far about specific principles for individual support in experimentation, although experimentation in science teaching plays a key role in learning (Wirth et al., 2008). Furthermore, the findings in this context relate primarily to learning groups in German Gymnasien (grammar schools), so little is known about the use of individualised learning settings at other types of schools. How pupils of different abilities learn individually with open and cooperative experimental tasks and how the processing depends on the individual learning requirements and the composition of the learning groups formed has largely been neglected in research thus far.

How?

The project is based on an interweaving of qualitative and quantitative data. These are collected in the context of cooperative experimental tasks applied in the content areas of “air and water”, “acids, alkalis and salts”, and “electrical energy from chemical reactions” in the second year of learning chemistry at all types of lower secondary schools in North Rhine-Westphalia. With the help of paper-based tests with multiple-choice items, prior knowledge (own test development and project by Kübra Celik), basic cognitive skills (Heller & Perleth, 2000), knowledge of scientific working methods (Koenen, 2014; Mannel, 2009) and affective factors (Fechner, 2009) are recorded and evaluated on the basis of IRT (Boone et al., 2014). In order to gain insights into the processing of the experimental tasks, the experimental phases will be videotaped and the learning process evaluated within the framework of a qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2015) of individual learning activities and difficulties. The results from the video evaluation are then correlated with the performance data at the individual and small-group level within the framework of a correlation study.