Within ChemCom every unit followed the same pattern:
– Introduce students to a societal theme involving chemistry,
– Lead students to realise that they need to understand chemistry in order to evaluate ways of addressing the issue in an informed way, and
– Learning the relevant chemistry, showing its connection to the issue and using chemistry knowledge in decision making activities related to the scientific/technological aspects of the issue.
The report regarding the effectiveness of the programme, related to the students and teachers, provided mixed findings. Regarding the teachers, Ware and Tinnesand (2005) reported that most teachers that were familiar with the course had strong feelings about it, some were very enthusiastic and others doubted the effectiveness of the approach. However, five editions were published up until 2005 and more than 2 million students from different backgrounds and with differing characteristics and school-types were involved in the programme. This might serve as an indication for the success of the course implementation. Salters Advanced Chemistry. Also in the UK, a context-based course was developed at the University of York from the 1980s (e.g. Benett & Lubben, 2006). There were two main characteristics of the Salters Chemistry beyond ChemCom. One feature was the intensive involvement of chemistry teachers into the development, who provided many good ideas related to the pedagogical aspects of the course. This bottom-up approach proved to have the potential to enhance teachers’ ownership related to the programme, a fact that had positive influence on the effectiveness of the implementation of the course in schools. The other initiative was a thorough focus on student-centred methods to enhance students’ interest and motivation to learn chemistry. In Salters Chemistry the chemistry concepts are outlined to fulfil the whole range of a typical chemistry syllabus. But the outline is not used as the structure for the curriculum. All chemistry content is developed through everyday life contexts such as: Chemistry of life or Minerals and medicine. Table 6 provides a structure, outlining how the context (the ‘storyline’) in the Salters curriculum is connected to the content and students’ activities. (For a parallel example on the same topic from Israel, using the context of industrial case studies, see Hofstein and Kesner, 2006.) Today, starting from the Salters experience a new CB approach has been developed by the same institute under the