Characteristics of Meaningful Chemistry Education

In this paper we elaborate on three potential strategies to promote meaningful chemistry education: using relevant contexts, offering content on a need-to-know basis, and making students feel that their input matters. We illustrate that it is educationally worthwhile to incorporate these characteristics, through our work on a particular chemistry module. Such emphasis leads to concrete, empirically based designs of modules and to heuristic guidelines for educational design decisions. It also productively informs further theorizing, such as an improved conceptualisation of the relations between the three characteristics. We therefore suggest that the type of investigation discussed in this paper, and the scenario-based design method which goes along with it, deserves a more prominent place in science education research.

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