Chemical education reform is under way in many countries. An important reason for
this reform is the growing dissatisfaction with the position of many chemistry
curricula: quite isolated from students’ personal interest, from current society and
technology issues, and from modern chemistry. One of the efforts to abolish current
curriculum isolation is the use of meaningful contexts for teaching and learning
chemistry. From the 1980s, context-based curriculum projects were implemented in
mainstream chemistry courses, for instance, the USA project of ‘Chemistry in the
Community’ (ChemCom) and the UK project of ‘Salters Chemistry’. Quite recently,
new projects were implemented, such as the USA project of ‘Chemistry in Contexts:
Applying Chemistry to Society’ (CiC), and the German project of ‘Chemie im
Kontext’ (ChiK). Contexts were adopted to encourage a more positive attitude and a
better understanding of chemistry. However, it appears that the implementation of
contexts-based courses is not as simple as it looks like, and effects on students’
understanding of chemistry concepts are somewhat disappointing. The present paper
discusses some important conditions for improving context-based chemical education.