A THEORY-BASED INSTRUMENT TO EVALUATE MOTIVATIONAL TRIGGERS PERCEIVED BY STUDENTS IN STEM CAREER-RELATED SCENARIOS

Students' lack of motivation in learning school science has been recognized as a problem, due to its negative impact on students´ STEM-related career choices. For supporting students´ motivation to study science, the use of an introduction which sets the scene, sometimes called a scenario, has been recommended. Although scenarios, which introduce STEM-related careers in an everyday life problem solving context, are seen as useful tools for the teachers, they are not automatically guaranteed to be motivating to students. The current research aims to develop an empirically tested and validated instrument to measure the impact of context-based scenarios, through evaluating perceived motivational triggers such as relevance, interest and enjoyment by 7th grade students. An analysis of students´ responses showed that the test scenario was able to trigger mostly situational interest toward the topic of energetics. Only a small number of students indicated motivation to take the learning of this topic further.