Überschätzen die Lehrmittelautor:innen den authentischen Lebensweltbezug von MINT-Aufgaben? Eine Studie zur Lernendenperspektive

In scientific literacy and context-based science education, the relationship to daily life is of upmost importance. As an aspect of task quality, many research projects assess and evaluate the relationship to daily life of written tasks. A major difficulty in task analysis is that trained lecturers’ analyses can be different from those of the target group in the classroom, as document analysis shows only the objective potential of tasks from the assessors’ perspective. The embedding of tasks in lessons, the level of solutions, and task evaluation by learners have been overlooked. At present, hardly any studies exist dealing with the analysis of written tasks and task assessments by learners in the classroom. To reduce this research gap, this project compares how subject-specific education authors assess the tasks they have developed and how learners perceive the same tasks in class after they have been completed. For this purpose, learners (N = 805) assessed selected STEM tasks (N = 16) for their relationship to daily life (min. 66, max. 182 learners per task) using the Instrument to Analyse Tasks. The learners’ assessments are analyzed and discussed using inferential statistics from the perspective of teaching-material authors. This research shows that learners have diverse perceptions of the relationship to daily life in the investigated STEM tasks. Moreover, learner gender does not have a significant influence here. Comparing the learners’ and authors’ assessments of the teaching materials makes it clear that the authors generally assess the tasks to be more authentic than do the learners. Because of the obvious discrepancy between the two perspectives on tasks’ relationship to daily life, the potential benefit of iteratively including the learner’s perspective when creating tasks is discussed.