Can chemistry knowledge influence student behavior? A neuropedagogy-based intervention as good practice to address cognitive and affective learning factors

1 Introduction

The OECD ¹ Learning Compass 2030 framework defines a “new normal” in education, emphasizing the affective, social, and cognitive aspects of learning alongside procedural, epistemic, and content knowledge. Central to this transition is supporting student agency, which is defined as the capacity to set goals, reflect, and act responsibly to effect change, and support making a decision at cognitive, social, and affective levels. ^{2 , 3} Agency develops through real-world, social, and material interactions that enable developing the above-mentioned foundational skills. Moreover, agency is context-specific; different forms of agency, such as political, social, artistic, and scientific, require applying agency-related foundational skills within specific contexts to achieve context-specific goals. ³

The unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic provide a stark example of how diminished agency can affect individuals’ behavior, particularly in the realm of public health adherence. The COVID-19 pandemic brought extraordinary restrictions on individual freedoms, leading many to experience a profound sense of reduced agency. ^{4 , 5} This loss of control over personal and societal circumstances had significant implications regarding compliance with health regulations. Psychological theories suggest that a perceived lack of agency can induce frustration, stress, and helplessness, undermining motivation to adhere to external demands. ⁶ Moreover, individuals may exhibit psychological reactance, resisting rules they perceive as infringing on their autonomy. Such behaviors are often amplified when restrictions are perceived as overly rigid or inconsistent with individuals’ values or needs, particularly in younger audiences. ⁷

A lack of agency may also erode trust in authorities, further diminishing compliance. This distrust is exacerbated when individuals feel excluded from decision-making processes, fostering the belief that regulations are imposed without considering their needs or perspectives. Consequently, feelings of exclusion and disempowerment can contribute to lower levels of public cooperation regarding accepting health measures. ^{8 , 9 , 10} Behaviorally, reduced agency can lead to disengagement from protective practices, since individuals may feel that their actions have little impact, consequently becoming apathetic or fatalistic. ^{11 , 12} Some may respond by engaging in risky behaviors to regain a sense of autonomy, even against health guidelines. ¹³ These dynamics highlight the need for public health strategies that address the psychological and behavioral impacts of reduced agency to improve compliance during crises. Similar patterns are observed in other contexts such as climate change, where knowledge alone has a limited effect on behavior, and psychological, social, and emotional factors play a greater role. ^{14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18} Behavioral science studies have explored the gap between knowledge and behavior, highlighting the need for innovative approaches to bridge it. ¹⁹ Thus, if knowledge alone is not enough to influence behavior, what can be done at the educational level?

Education can serve as a powerful tool to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to develop agency and effectively address such challenges. This could be valid for scientific subjects such as chemistry, which is known as a central science ²⁰ and constitutes an essential part of the solution for many real-world challenges. Nevertheless, studies suggest that high-school students often find chemistry irrelevant to their daily lives, which may explain their declining interest in pursuing advanced studies in it. ^{21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25} According to Aikenhead ²⁶ , the science content taught in schools rarely applies to real-life situations, leading many students to struggle with finding the material meaningful, even if the context appears somewhat relatable. One possible reason for this perceived irrelevance is the separation between science and society in chemistry education. ²⁷

Thus, the perceived irrelevance of chemistry might hinder the role of chemical education as an agentic factor and highlights the importance of adopting context-based learning (CBL) approaches when teaching chemistry in combination with approaches that target affective and social aspects of learning to link chemistry to students’ personal experiences and offer them opportunities to consider chemistry as personally meaningful. CBL approaches help students develop logical frameworks for understanding chemistry. ^{24 , 28} They emphasize applying scientific concepts to real-world situations, enhancing students’ comprehension while also preparing them to engage as responsible citizens in their everyday lives. ^{26 , 29}

A fundamental aspect of the CBL approach is the “need-to-know” principle, which suggests that student engagement and retention can be enhanced if a genuine need to acquire knowledge or skills is recognized during learning. ²³ The “need-to-know” principle implies that the context should justify the learning of content from the student’s point of view, thus ensuring that learning is both valuable on a personal level and relevant in external contexts. To encourage student agency in the context of CBL, the learning environment should enable students to undergo learning experiences through which foundational skills can be acquired in parallel to knowledge ³⁰ under the lens of real-world scenarios and while considering varied aspects of learning.

With the aim of advancing knowledge-based decision-making and agency in chemistry students and influencing student behavior regarding pandemic-related regulations, we developed the present unit, which contextualizes nano-chemistry in public health. To address the cognitive, affective, and social aspects of learning integratively, the unit was developed by considering instructional design principles that were found to be effective in supporting conceptual meaning-making as well as personal meaning-making processes by using the neuropedagogical approach, as explained below. Following the development of this well-structured unit about the science behind the imposed public health regulations, we set out to explore its possible impact on high-school chemistry students' behavior regarding the regulations. Next, we describe the development, implementation, and evaluation phases in detail.

2 Unit development

2.2 From theory to instructional design

In line with the unit’s goal, the learning grid for developing the activities presented here materialized from the intersection between Nano-Chemistry, Public Health, and Neuropedagogy (Figure 1). The specific components of each of the three dimensions of the adapted learning grid were defined by considering the content to be taught as well as the desired learning outcomes of learning through the unit. After evaluating them, we identified three suitable pedagogical strategies through which we could implement the neuropedagogical principles in this unit, namely, active learning, social and emotional learning, and visual literacy strategies. Consequently, these pedagogical strategies were adapted to be implemented by using the neuropedagogical approach by selecting those neuropedagogical principles that we considered to be essential to support sense-making and personal meaning-making in the framework of the developed unit (see Figure 1, Neuropedagogy axis).

Figure 1:

Schematic diagram of the three-dimensional conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, public health integrating, high-school nano-chemistry learning grid.

Active Learning (AL) refers to a learning experience whereby the learner is actively involved in the process of constructing knowledge and gaining skills. It applies to the instructional approaches whereby participants take an active role in the learning process, in contrast to the more passive role that they have in the lecture-based modes of learning. ⁴⁵ Active learning has been shown to enhance student engagement, as well as their critical thinking abilities, knowledge retention, and overall learning outcomes. ⁴⁶ It is widely recognized as a valuable approach in educational settings, ranging from primary and secondary schools to higher education as well as professional development programs ^{47 , 48 , 49} In the context of the unit presented here, the employed AL strategies include activating information-processing pathways other than the visual-aural ones, e.g., speech and movement while conducting most of the lesson by engaging in collaborative problem solving, exploratory learning, and student-led discussions using puzzles, dilemmas, and riddles.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is a combined process through which individuals acquire new knowledge and skills through interaction and shared experiences. The SEL framework is centered on developing emotional and social intelligences. It emphasizes the need for developing students’ social and emotional skills not at the expense of cognitive ones, but rather as essential for supporting overall well-being and growth. ⁵⁰ SEL can take place when learning occurs in a social environment where the circumstances allow for attributing personal meaning, for negotiating opinions and ideas, and for re-shaping attitudes, behavior, values, and beliefs. ^{51 , 52} For example, in this unit, SEL as a strategy implies engaging in pair and group work, which naturally involves expressing self-generated output in argumentation, co-construction of shared semantic expressions in collaborative tasks, and knowledge negotiation. In all cases, the need for communication involves the external use of language in reasoning and requires greater mental effort. SEL also becomes apparent in this unit when students are invited to participate in discussions, solve dilemmas, share their own opinions, and discuss them in a group. Emotional tagging connected to emotional arousal loops is expected to occur whenever self-expression is involved ⁵³ , increasing the chance of attributing personal meaning to content.

Visual Literacy Strategies (VLS) are pedagogical strategies that aim at facilitating the development of visual literacy skills in students. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) ⁵⁴ is one such strategy and was found effective in imparting visual literacy skills. ⁵⁵ It introduces art and visual images as tools to enhance creative and critical thinking, as well as communication skills. In the NP-MLG model, the original VTS approach was combined with other visual literacy fostering methods, ³⁹ and adapted to support the challenges that chemistry students face when dealing with scientific visual representations of chemical content. Several studies have shown that verbal reasoning to integrate verbal and non-verbal input in visualization supports learning in chemistry when complex visual representations of content are involved ^{56 , 57 , 58} . In this unit, students are given longer observation times to interact with the images and are then asked to engage in the verbal mediation of visual images while reasoning. They are guided by the task to analyze the given images and find semantic expressions of their evaluation (self-generated output), then discuss their interpretations, and finally answer carefully crafted questions about the given images. Figure 2 is an example of one such image that students were requested to analyze through a VLS task while learning in the presented unit. The picture depicts the moment when the virus and the human cell membrane fuse and the genetic material of the virus is free to enter the human cell intracellular space. In addition, given the graphical nature of pandemic-related information disseminated in the media, as well as the need to visualize abstract images to internalize chemical content in this unit, visual literacy was emphasized by implementing an adapted version of the VTS approach.

Figure 2:

Illustration of the fusion between the virus and the human cell membrane.

3 The unit’s form and content

The unit presented here consists of four consecutive lessons, each focusing on different topics chosen hierarchically, in growing levels of organization: Lesson 1: The virus, Lesson 2: The pandemic and related concepts, Lesson 3: Masks, and Lesson 4: Planning for action (Further details are provided in the Supplementary Material). As mentioned above, the unit was developed to actively engage chemistry students in integrating previous knowledge learned in the chemistry classroom (see Figure 1, High School Nano chemistry axis) with new content from the field of public health (see Figure 1, Public Health axis). Specifically, nano-chemistry concepts and terms were contextualized in public health, and students were requested to explore chemistry topics under pandemic-related contexts such as virus structure, infection mechanism, mask structure and materials, as well as the masks’ principle of action, from the molecular to the process levels (see Figure 1, Public Health and Nano Chemistry axes intersection).

A summary of the unit in terms of topics and contextualization appear in Table 1. The neuropedagogical principles employed in this unit are also described in detail in Table 1, including a short elaboration on how they took shape in relation to each lesson in the unit, its topic, and pedagogical goals.

4 Implementing the unit

Through the circulation of advertising posters in relevant social media, chemistry teachers were invited to participate in a short (45 min) online workshop open to all teachers at the national level. Here, they were exposed to the unit materials that were then made available to all. In addition, the research team was fully available to address implementational questions from teachers as required. The unit was implemented in the classrooms; it consisted of four lessons of 90 min each. A detailed description of the sequence of implementation by lesson follows.

Lesson 1 - The Virus as a Molecular Machine: The lesson starts by revising previous knowledge on molecular structures, functional groups, and intermolecular forces. Revision takes place through a multiple-choice worksheet on which students work in pairs and then discuss their answers when the teacher presents them. Then, the teacher teaches the topics of the orders of magnitude, the virus structure, and the infection mechanism through a second presentation with carefully crafted visuals and short videos. The revised content is connected to the new terms and concepts being taught. To close this lesson, students work in pairs and engage in a puzzle-like activity in which they are asked to apply previous and newly gained knowledge to assemble, chronologically, a three-vignette story of the infection mechanism and then write explanatory captions regarding the images, using chemical terms to describe the depicted processes.

Lesson 2 - The Pandemic and Us: This lesson focuses on the pandemic through the lens of Public Health. Students begin by answering a quick, individual quiz to recap what they know, or think they know, about how to behave according to media-disseminated regulations. Then, they engage in group work where each group analyzes one of many news stories about COVID-19. Tasks here require analyzing diagrams, graphs, and texts, each touching on a pandemic-related concept or term such as asymptomatic transmission of the virus, the case-fatality ratio, flattening the curve, and virus variants. Each group is asked to learn about a given term or concept, summarize the information and teach their peers about it through a short presentation. After that, students are asked to complete an individual questionnaire that presents them with regulations-related behavioral dilemmas. After they have completed the questionnaire, the teacher poses the question, “After what we have just learned, how is the pandemic connected to me, to the community?” and then leads a class discussion on how the pandemic affects each of us personally, and how our own behavior can make a difference in slowing down its transmission. The lesson ends by watching a short humoristic video (YNET, 2020) about thoughtless behavior regarding regulations, showing that the virus can be spread through everyday interactions, which are most common and, in non-pandemic times, sociably accepted.

Lesson 3 - The Chemistry of Masks: The third lesson starts by asking students to visit an emulated exhibition set up on the classroom’s walls, showing historical pictures of different masks and people wearing masks from previous times in history. Throughout the exhibition, students are requested to understand that pandemics and wearing masks are not new events in human history. Then, students move to a display simulating a kiosk of a “Mask Market”, where students are exposed to all types of masks that are sold in shops and pharmacies. Students are asked to select a mask from the display and explain why they chose it. After sharing their choices, the teacher explains the chemistry of masks, covering topics such as hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, polymer molecules and polymeric materials, the structure of masks’ layers, and the role of nanoparticles that serve as anti-bacterial and anti-viral surfaces. During this section of the lesson, chemistry topics revised and learned during lesson 1 and public health topics learned in lesson 2 are integrated through the teacher’s explanations and thereafter during a summative activity. The summative activity begins with a short video from the news where the presenter compares different masks in terms of filtering efficiency and price. Students are requested to evaluate the statements made in the video through inquiry methods and by applying chemistry content that the teacher taught. To do so, students must analyze the images of masks taken with a Scanning Electron Microscope ( Figure 3) and use the information inferred from these images combined with concepts from polymeric materials at the molecular level. To close the lesson, students revisit their earlier mask choice based on the chemistry of the various types of masks and indicate whether their opinion has changed now that they know more about the science behind it.

Figure 3:

Scanning electron microscope images of different types of masks.

Lesson 4 - Taking Knowledge into Action: The fourth lesson is an integrating lesson. Students are asked to engage in a scientific literacy task requiring them to employ central ideas and skills learned through the unit: discussing the science behind governmental regulations, understanding m-RNA vaccines through nano-chemistry concepts taught during the unit, recalling the basics of how droplets spread the virus and why masks help, based on the chemistry of masks. Teachers can consider this task as a short test and grade it. After students complete the task, the teacher explains to them about socio-scientific activism, what activism means, and how one can take social action by disseminating research-based, scientific knowledge in the community. In small groups, and guided by driving questions delivered through a worksheet, students are asked to choose a preferred community-reaching activity, such as making informative posters, sharing knowledge on social media, or organizing mask donations. After planning the activity, students are required to submit their plan. The teacher can also encourage them to execute the planned activity, thus conveying to them that she trusts them as agents of change and encourages them to actively utilize their understanding of integrated nano-chemistry and public health.

The expected chemistry learning outcomes from participating in this unit can be understood in terms of the different lessons’ themes. During the lessons’ progression, the students are offered the opportunity to apply curricular chemistry content learnt in class in varied contexts: to explain the virus infection mechanism, to understand the science behind public health terms that they hear in the media, to understand the chemical properties of the materials used in masks and how these works, and to know the chemistry related to the design of mRNA vaccines. Moreover, regarding behavioural outcomes, we expected that by the end of the unit, we would see a change in students’ behavior regarding mask-related regulations.

5 Evaluation

6 Results and discussion

The results of the narrative qualitative analysis indicate that the neuropedagogy-based learning unit impacted students on three primary levels: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. A summary of the key findings is presented below:

As can be seen in the representative quotes shown in Table 2, students’ answers revealed retention of chemical content and conceptual understanding. When exposed to the illustration of the viral infection mechanism, most students proceeded to explain the viral infection mechanism in terms of the chemical entities and the intermolecular forces between them involved in this mechanism (question 6). When exposed to an electron microscope magnified image of masks’ fibres in question 8, most students could correctly identify masks’ structural features and then, explain how different masks work (or do not) to prevent exposure to the virus based on intermolecular forces, hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity.

In order to produce their narrative explanations, students must not only to recall visual information on the visual elements in display, but also to retrieve related chemistry concepts and relationships through which to interpret and explain the meaning of the images. Students’ answers shed light on the possible transduction of abstract chemistry concepts and their metaphorical association with the visual images displayed. Thus, through these narratives, we gain evidence that the integration of non-verbal (visual) and verbal (conceptual) information might have taken place, depending on the scientific accuracy of the answers.

Although this evaluation focused on the subjective experiences of six students, overall, the insights gained are valuable. The findings support the suitability of designing instruction to incorporate neuropedagogical principles in educational settings, particularly when addressing complex, real-world topics such as public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. The neuropedagogical, integrative approach employed in the learning unit seems to have had a positive impact on students’ affective, cognitive, and behavioral engagement. This unit seems to have elicited a learning experience that facilitated a deeper understanding and long-term retention of complex concepts. The deliberate incorporation of contextual chemistry applications and visual literacy strategies exemplifies how neuropedagogy-informed integrative practices have the potential to transform traditional learning environments into more dynamic and impactful educational experiences ⁶³ .

Our findings regarding the possible impact of the unit on students’ knowledge, emotional engagement, and behavior are valuable within the framework of the OECD Learning Compass 2030 ¹ , which emphasize the development of student agency as a core educational outcome of explicitly addressing agency-supporting skills in formal educational settings. The findings suggest that the neuropedagogy-based, integrative learning unit possibly fostered agency by encouraging students to move beyond merely incorporating knowledge toward active engagement in the learning process, while contextualizing the core scientific subject in a real-world scenario.

Despite the restrictions on personal freedoms imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as mandatory mask-wearing, which may have initially diminished students’ sense of agency ^{4 , 5} , participation in the unit appeared to counteract these effects. Some students reported a shift from passive compliance to informed, purposeful decision-making, enabling students to better understand and internalize the scientific rationale behind mask usage. This transition aligns with the notion that fostering agency significantly enhances students’ cognitive and social development, since they take ownership of their learning and apply it meaningfully beyond the classroom setting ^{64 , 65 , 66 , 67} .

In today’s rapidly evolving world, cultivating student agency is essential ⁶⁸ . Empowering students to make informed decisions and take meaningful actions prepares them to effectively navigate and address complex societal issues. Research indicates that fostering student agency not only contributes to individual growth, butit also promotes positive societal change, since students become better equipped to address and influence issues that affect them and their communities ^{64 , 68 , 69} . Thus, educational approaches that prioritize the development of agency are crucial for preparing students to meet contemporary challenges with confidence and competence. Building on the importance of agency, the integration of NP in chemistry CBL seems to positively influence not only knowledge but also the development of thinking skills and understanding, processes that support agency. Further research and development should address this evidence-based hypothesis.

7 Limitations and further research

As mentioned in the Description of the Evaluation Methodology, during the large-scale implementation of the unit, a change in regulations regarding mask-wearing occurred. This shift introduced a key challenge to the evaluation of the intervention’s implementation, potentially affecting both the context and the behavior of the participants. It also required substantial adjustments to the evaluation methods to align with the new circumstances. While the study originally planned as a quasi-experimental study, these unanticipated changes limited the ability to isolate the effects of the intervention and fully assess behavior change by the implementation of the quantitative tools. Furthermore, the relatively small sample size, though consistent with qualitative methodologies, further constrains the generalizability of the findings. Given these factors, the study should be viewed as exploratory, offering preliminary evidence of the intervention’s potential impact. Future research with a larger sample applying the quantitative tools will be essential to explore the hypotheses in depth and better establish mechanisms of influence and possible causal relationships.