A second study that investigated the relevance to students’ lives of a contextbased
curriculum occurred during the evaluation of The PLON project. This
project began in 1973 as a physics curriculum development project for general
secondary education in The Netherlands. Contexts such as Working with Water,
Living in Air and Energy in our Homes structured the PLON curriculum. One
particular study of the project investigated the reality-centredness and activitycentredness
of the curriculum materials. Activity-centredness referred to
activity learning where the students performed a learning task in an independent
and autonomous way rather than being guided and controlled by the
teacher. Reality-centredness referred to the extent to which the subject of physics
was presented explicitly in relation to everyday life and to students’ out-ofschool
experiences (Wierstra and Wubbels 1992, 1994 ) . The two groups of
students that were selected for the study included a PLON group of students
and a control group. The control group of students were from classrooms taught
with a more traditional textbook. Student perceptions of the classroom environment
(reality- and activity-centredness) were measured by a classroom environment
survey administered after a mechanics lesson from the context of
Traffic.