IWM design recommendations provide new impulses for teaching materials on the LEIFIchemie portal

Since the end of November, the LEIFIchemie online portal provides teachers and students in lower and upper secondary levels with teaching materials, tasks and experiment instructions free of charge. The Hamburg-based Joachim Herz Foundation is thus continuing the successful concept of LEIFIphysik - one of the most successful studying portals for natural sciences for 20 years - for chemistry. The IWM contributed to the vast collection of materials with design recommendations for texts, illustrations and videos on the particle model. For the material conception, research findings originating from the eChemBook project played an important role.

The eChemBook is the result of a DFG-project with the aim of developing an evidence-based teaching concept for the use of digital media in chemistry classes. The IWM carried out the project in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Sascha Schanze, Leibniz University Hannover, the Schroedel Westermann schoolbook publisher and SMART Technologies. "For the development of the teaching materials, findings from both empirical teaching/learning research and didactical research were used. This resulted in general design recommendations that were also taken into account in the creation of LEIFIchemie," explains Prof. Dr. Katharina Scheiter, who is responsible for the project at IWM. She also welcomes the initiative for LEIFIchemie in her role as Senior Fellow in the Joachim Herz Foundation's "Kolleg Didaktik:digital."

"The idea of LEIFIchemie is to offer a portal for teachers where they can download high-quality teaching materials," adds Katharina Scheiter. In the long term, LEIFIchemie could also become the basis for new research projects to improve the development and distribution of digital materials for science education in schools. In this way, the successful cooperation with Sascha Schanze, who heads the LEIFIchemie project, can also be continued.