Making chemistry labs more relevant – development and evaluation of contextualised pre-lab materials for qualitative inorganic analysis

In undergraduate chemistry lab courses it is common to jointly teach students with different academic backgrounds, previous experiences, interests and career aspirations. A neglect of this diversity can lead to missing relevance of the learning content, frustration, and higher drop-out rates. Although the perceived relevance can significantly impact students’ learning outcomes, this potential has been largely overlooked. Context-based learning offers great potential to increase students’ perceived relevance by connecting the learning content to real-world contexts. However, there is a lack of suitable learning materials so far. We present a design-based research study consisting of 3 iterations giving insights into the development and evaluation process of contextualised pre-lab learning materials to increase the perceived relevance of a first-year undergraduate qualitative inorganic lab course. The materials contain battery recycling as real-world context, professional references to school and chemistry industry, chemical inquiry methods, and scientific reasoning skills. For the evaluation we involved different stakeholders and applied a mixed-methods methodology incorporating semi-structured think-aloud interviews and an online questionnaire. The results confirm a high potential of the materials. Besides our final materials, we provide implications for the design of contextualised pre-lab learning materials that make university chemistry labs more relevant for students with diverse backgrounds.