Attitudes Towards Chemistry among Low and High Achieving 9th Grade Students in Laboratory Investigations and Theoretical Explanations

How does a modified curricular unit about energy change in chemical processes influence self-efficacy, attitudes toward chemistry and learning gains among 9th-grade students? Four 9^th grade classrooms studied a modified energy-change curricular unit: two classrooms in a public school, and two other classrooms in a science magnet school. The modified curricular unit was divided into two chapters: the first addressed the phenomenon of energy change in chemical reactions using several laboratory experiments. The second chapter focused on theoretical explanations of energy change using the model of dissociation / formation of chemical bonds. In contrast, conventional teaching of this unit integrates theory and experiments concurrently throughout the unit and includes little active experimentation. We find that students’ self-efficacy and attitudes toward chemistry increased when learning the modified unit, compared to a control group from the magnet school that learned the same topic using a conventional teaching approach. In addition, we found that the magnet school students’ performance on the posttest was better than the regular school students, but comprehension of energy change improved among students in both groups. Finally, we found that the self-efficacy of students who chose the physics specialization in the subsequent year, were higher than those of students who did not choose physics, but their attitudes towards chemistry - were less favorable. We discuss these results within the Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) of motivation, and the big fish little pond effect (BFLPE).