It can be stated that many German students do not see vocational opportunities for themselves after they finished school; this is true especially for those from non-academic high schools (in German: Hauptschule). However, in Germany there are many job vacancies in the chemical industry. According to prognoses, this will endanger Germany’s economic growth. Students are not aware of these opportunities in the science and especially not of those in the chemical industry. But even if they were they would not consider taking up a job in the scientific-technical field. (Bertels & Bolte 2009; in process).

Theoretical Framework

With this in mind we combined four different theoretical approaches: The first theory addresses the experience and the assessment of chemistry teaching: Most of us would not choose a career which deals mostly with a subject we did not enjoy at school. Bolte (2004) developed a questionnaire to investigate the “motivational learning environment (MoLE)” in different schools subjects. One of the MoLE-dimensions is the students’ satisfaction with their chemistry lessons.

The theoretical approach which promises to yield insights into what is relevant for students is the concept of the “developmental tasks” elaborated by Havighurst (1972). He states that people have to cope with different tasks in specific phases of their lives. The term “developmental task” was introduced by Havighurst as “a task which arises at or about a certain period in the life of the individual, successful achievement of which leads to his happiness and to success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness in the individual, disapproval in the society, and difficulty with later tasks” (Havighurst 1981, p 2). Schenk (2005) defined six developmental tasks which should be dealt with in chemistry lessons (value, concepts, vocation, self, gender, body).

A further factor which could influence the career choice related to chemistry of students is the concept of the“self-to-prototype matching”. Work conducted for example by Chambers (1983) or Narayan (2009) show that students have negative stereotypes of scientists. Hannover and Kessels (2002, 2004) investigated this field in Germany. Whenever we choose a job, a university course or even a hobby, we compare our self-image with that of the prototype. If prototype and self-image match, it is likely that we will choose that job, university course or hobby. Hence, if the students’ prototype of people who work in chemical industry is rather negative (the picture of the ‘mad scientist’ comes to mind) then students are likely not to choose careers in science and technology.

The fourth approach, which explains (potential) influencing factors in making important decisions such as the choice of future profession, is the “self-concept” (eg. Eccles 1983, 1992, Marsh & Yeung, 1997, Köller et al. 2000). Taskinen (2010) shows that self-concept highly correlates with the likeliness of taking up a career in the sciences.

Previous findings

We have already shown that German Hauptschule students describe their motivational learning environment in science lessons as mostly bad – or not satisfying. We have also shown that all subject related developmental tasks mentioned by Schenk (2005) were considered as important by the students (Bertels & Bolte 2009). However, the students did not feel sufficiently supported in dealing with these developmental tasks. Regarding the self-to-prototype matching theory Hauptschule students’ self and their assessment regarding their prototype of a person who works in the field of chemistry do not really match at all (Bertels & Bolte 2009). Last but not least, the chemistry related self-concept of German Hauptschule students is negatively assessed by the majority of this group of students (85,5% of this group assessed their abilities in chemistry as rather bad; Bertels & Bolte, in process).

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