Experimenting at an outreach science lab versus at school—Differences in students' basic need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and flow experience

All over the world, educational science outreach programs in which students can perform laboratory work have been developed. A common goal of these is to counteract students' decreasing motivation STEM education. In Germany, several labs established last 20 years. It assumed that characteristics foster basic need satisfaction and qualities such as intrinsic flow. However, research this field often lacks comparisons between learning environments lab school. Thus, current study investigated perceived (relatedness, competence, autonomy), motivation, flow experience during experimentation at an (n = 231) school 203). We found two different resulted a comparable degree autonomy motivation. differences relatedness, were favor who experimented lab. visiting especially beneficial for perception effectiveness, enjoyment experimentation.