Interessensgeleitete Entwicklung, Erprobung und Evaluation von Modellen zu geo- und umweltphysikalischen Themen im Schülerlabor der Universität Siegen

This present work was created as a part of a newly established school laboratory in the field of physics didactics at the University of Siegen. The conception of the focus of activity for the laboratory is the primary intention of this work, in order to ensure a sustainable development of the newly created institution.
School laboratories differ from other extracurricular learning centers in particular by the way in which students deal with the learning content, namely, by student experiments. This activity-oriented student activity forms the basis of a laboratory course, which is of vital importance. As a consequence, the development and construction of student experiments within this work hold a very high priority.
In the present investigation numerous newly developed and improved experimental set-ups are being described. These are aimed especially at the primarily level school students and serve mainly the purpose to convey the very basic physical fundamentals employing analogy experiments.
School laboratories are extracurricular learning centers, which are intended to arouse and develop the interest of children and adolescents in mathematic, scientific and technical subjects. Accordingly, the interest, strictly speaking, the interest in physical-technical topics, is one of the central concepts which will be addressed in this present work. A definition of the term interest, how interest is developed and which empirical findings regarding the physical-technical interest-development of primary and secondary level school students exist, will be explained in detail in order to create a validated basis for the own research project in this scientific field. Several selected effectiveness analyses of school laboratories serve as a basis for the present conception, which are therefore presented in detail at the beginning.
The following aspects represent discrete and independent contributions of the present doctoral dissertation: In a internal laboratory study on the interest the interestingness of the geo- and environmental physical issues for children and adolescents have been examined and key issues identified. In addition to the interests of the students their previous knowledge, respectively their concepts and notions in relation to the above mentioned subject areas are extremely important for a successful learning-achieved engagement with these issues.
Therefore an own internal laboratory study have been designed and performed in order to attain in a number of ways insights about the previous knowledge of the learners in the fields of geo- and environmental physics.
In accordance with the newly developed analogy experiments a new and also empirically established experimental range for the laboratory of the University of Siegen arose.
The developed conception of the school laboratory has been manifoldly practically put to test and evaluated through various student surveys.