I also read newspapers.
When I read a newspaper, I also always have in mind,
is this something that I could bring in class?
Very often, these are examples where the texts, the article in the newspaper is,
I wouldn't say total nonsense, but for a chemist, there are obvious mistakes.
And I bring these examples just, also, to to
bring the students to thinking what they actually read and what they hear.
Nowadays, everyone is always swamped with information in our information age.
And we have to filter this, and we have to learn to critically look at this,
and read it, and think about it.
Is this really correct?
Does it make sense or not?
And especially, the basic courses in chemistry, physics, mathematics,
or whatever, they are here to help us understand what is actually going on.
Does this make sense?
And this is also very good training for later on, because in research,
when we do research in the lab, we always have to think about what are we doing?
Why are we doing this?
Does this make sense?
In which direction are we going?
Because there,
we are really working at the border and we don't know what is coming.
So we have to think ourselves.
>> Science education research has shown that, especially,
implementing socioscientific issues, so issues that connect our knowledge
from the science faculties, from the science classroom to the society
out there is an important vehicle to increase students' learning.
It increases students' interest.
It increases students' motivation because they see the relevance of what they
are taught about.
So what I was, for example, doing is when I needed to teach
a general science course, I framed it completely with climate change.
And we made clear all the science concepts
we needed to teach about in the context of climate change.
The idea behind this was that students are able to apply their knowledge
about chemical equilibria, about thermal dynamics, about cells and
cell division into the context of climate change, and understand better what's
going on in the news and what's going on in politics from a science perspective.
So we can increase the interest and we can increase the motivation.
But what we can also increase is the content knowledge.
So we also can increase students' content knowledge, and
we can increase how they apply this content knowledge to different contexts.