PhD-Project Development and Evaluation of Text-based Stories as Learning Tools for Chemistry in Secondary Schools

The following research project aims at supporting students’ learning by alternative learning materials and is embedded in the project “Ganz In”.

“Ganz In – All-Day-schools for a Brighter Future. The New All-Day Secondary School in NRW“ is a project by the Mercator Foundation, the Institute for Research on the Development of Schools at the University of Dortmund – representing the three universities in the Ruhr region (UMR) –, the Ministry for School and further Education in North Rhine-Westphalia and 31 secondary schools.

Students lack chemistry content knowledge and additionally show low subject interest in chemistry in comparison to the subjects biology and mathematics (Pant et al., 2013; Sjøberg & Schreiner, 2010).

Therefore, there is a need for learning materials that enhance students’ interest in chemistry and foster learning simultaneously. Text-based stories may be suitable to successfully meet this challenge (e. g. Avraamidou & Osborne, 2009). In school the application of stories is often bound to the method of storytelling. This means that the teacher is telling a story aiming at motivation and increasing students’ interest before teaching a new content (e. g. Egan, 1988). Usually, those stories do not contain specific content knowledge; they just target a specific topic in order to initiate situational interest. Nowadays, stories are also used as texts which already contain the learning content (e. g. Martensen et al., 2007). 

When looking at chemistry text books it can be recognized that the paragraphs are crowded with technical terms and scientific facts, which can lead to a complex sentence structure (see Schüttler, 1994). This causes a high cognitive load. In addition, an expository text has a neutral style that is characterized by “it”- and passive constructions. In text-based stories other narrative elements are used (see Avraamidou & Osborne, 2009): e. g. storyline, narrator, protagonists, analogies etc. Thereby, protagonists can be persons as well as personified things (Avraamidou & Osborne, 2009). Furthermore, Taber et al. (1996) stated that personifications can be helpful for understanding chemical concepts. Analogies can be important because they can help students to build ‘conceptual bridges’ between familiar and unknown facts (e. g. Glynn, 2007).

 Currently, there are only a few empirical studies in chemistry which examine situational interest and effectiveness of learning with regard to text-based stories that contain personifications and analogies. Exactly, this is the aim of this study. It is aiming at comparing text-based stories that contain personifications and analogies to expository texts and looking at chemical learning achievement and situational interest.  

Therefore, two text-based stories were designed referring to the topics element families and atomic structure. In a first study, students were asked to think aloud while reading the texts. After then, the students were interviewed. The aim of this study was to figure out how the students understood and learned with these texts. Based on these results, the texts were improved.

Afterwards, the texts were used in an intervention study with a pre-post-follow-up-design in 8^th grade of secondary schools. They were compared to expository texts with the same contents. Both text types were constructed as learning material in combination with three identical exercises that students had to answer. Students’ learning outcome and students’ situational interest were considered as dependent variables. In addition, a questionnaire was constructed to evaluate students’ opinion towards the narrative elements of the text-based stories because some narrative elements may influence the situational interest and the learning outcome. Motivation, cognitive abilities, reading competence, subject interest, grades in chemistry and German, native language, language in free time and learning time were measured as control variables.

At the moment, the collected data is being analyzed. The results of this study will give a first insight in using this kind of text-based stories for regular lessons in comparison to expository texts.

Project Start

September 2013

Funding

Funded by the Mercator Foundation within the Project Ganz In (Project no. 08-341)

Supervisor

Elke Sumfleth, Jenna Koenen

PhD Project

Tim Reschke