Enhancing chemistry relevance in General Chemistry-I lecture course: Impact on students’ cognitive and affective outcomes

Contextualized chemistry curriculum has been shown to positively impact academic outcomes, especially in middle and secondary school levels. However, limited investigations on the impact of this form of curriculum on students’ learning outcomes in chemistry lecture courses in postsecondary education have been reported. This quasi-experimental design study investigated the effect of contextualized chemistry curriculum on General Chemistry I students’ achievement scores and perceived relevance of chemistry content, as well as the correlation between students’ perceived content relevance and the achievement scores in the course. A treatment group was exposed to chemistry content enriched with real-world contexts, contextualized quizzes, and application cards activities, whereas a comparison group was taught through the conventional approach. Data included scores from a final chemistry test and a 5-point Likert scale chemistry relevance survey scores. The survey generated three constructs, namely personal relevance, chemistry utility, and societal relevance. Results from the quantitative analysis indicated significant differences between the two groups on perceived relevance and performance scores, and significant correlations between the relevance constructs and performance in the final exam, all favoring especially the treatment group. For the qualitative part, data included responses from the written application cards activities and an end-of-semester open-ended questionnaire. The application cards prompt, asking students to write three points on how content from specific chapter units during the second part of the semester related to their daily experiences or career aspirations, were also completed as part of the online quizzes. Findings showed reported positive benefits of the contextualized learning materials on the assessed components. Detailed findings and implications for practice will be presented.