During the last 10 years, outreach science laboratories have become increasingly popular due to resource and time limitations in schools. Outreach laboratories offer hands-on projects in a situated and authentic learning setting, thereby promoting the development of students' scientific literacy. However, students' cognitive achievement within…

To monitor science motivation, 232 tenth graders of the college preparatory level ("Gymnasium") completed the Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQ-II). Additionally, personality data were collected using a 10-item version of the Big Five Inventory. A subsequent exploratory factor analysis based on the eigenvalue-greater-than-one…

Given the rapid development of modern biotechnology, attention to socioscientific issues in educational contexts is crucially important to support students in becoming responsible citizens. The authors' research focused on the impact of discussing socioscientific issues during biology lessons under 3 different treatments (teacher guided, student…

Besides cognitive learning effects, short-term environmental education (EE) is often regarded as ineffective in intervening with participants' environmental attitudes and behaviour. However, in Germany, school classes often participate in such 1-day EE programmes because they better match the school curriculum in contrast to longer (residential)…

We examined selected situational emotions (interest, well-being and anxiety) experienced by 291 secondary school tenth graders during a hands-on gene technology lesson. Two different instruction groups (I-1, I-2) participated in the same teaching unit, in which four basic gene technology experiments were performed. Using a modified…

Clean drinking water, our most important resource, needs comprehensive protection. Due to its ubiquitous availability, the awareness of the importance of clean drinking water has partially vanished. Therefore, sensitizing within this context and improving individual ecological behavior has become an important issue in science curricula. We…

Although informal learning environments have been studied extensively, ours is one of the first studies to quantitatively assess the impact of learning in botanical gardens on students' cognitive achievement. We observed a group of 10th graders participating in a one-day educational intervention on climate change implemented in a botanical garden.…

Nowadays, outreach labs are important informal learning environments in science education. After summarizing research to goals outreach labs focus on, we describe our evidence-based gene technology lab as a model of a research-driven outreach program. Evaluation-based optimizations of hands-on teaching based on cognitive load theory (additional…

A hands-on instructional approach with medium-achieving 10th-grade students (N = 294) successfully demonstrated the achievement of a conceptual change. Two teaching variations were applied (I-1, I-2), both dealing with a hands-on gene technology lesson in an out-of-school laboratory. I-2 additionally confronted the participants with alternative…

Research has shown that emotions play a significant role in the learning process and academic achievement. However, the fact that measurement of emotions during or after instruction usually requires written responses on lengthy research instruments has been given as a reason why researchers have tended to avoid research on this topic in…