Agreed discoveries: students’ negotiations in a virtual laboratory experiment

This paper presents an analysis of the scientific reasoning of a dyad of secondary school students about the phenomenon of dissolution of gases in water as they work on this in a simulated laboratory experiment. A web-based virtual laboratory was developed to provide learners with the opportunity to examine the influence of physical factors on gas solubility in water. An evaluation process involving 180 students revealed that the concepts connected to the dissolution of gas in water caused problems for the students even after having experimented with the virtual laboratory. To investigate the nature of learners’ reasoning about the visualised events, 13 video-recorded groups of learners were analysed. This study follows the reasoning of one group that displayed a possibly productive way of solving the problem. The results address the students’ general difficulty of discovering something that they are conceptually unprepared for within the virtual laboratory. The analysis shows how the students eventually found a way out of their dilemma by making an analogy with other dissolving processes. In effect, the analysis elucidates some of the analytical work that had to be done by the participants when collaboratively negotiating a shared meaning of a scientific concept in concord with a given task and set of instructional materials. Implications for design might be to provide the learning material with explicit hints that enable students to connect to specific phenomena related to the one investigated concept. The findings show the usefulness of video analytic research, informed by CA and ethnomethodology. This analytical framework can support design processes and provide useful information, which might identify hurdles to learning a scientific concept by simulated events and pathways to overcome these hurdles.     

Inquiring scaffolds in laboratory tasks: an instance of a “worked laboratory guide effect”?

The study explores if established support devices for paper–pencil problem solving, namely worked examples and incremental scaffolds, are applicable to laboratory tasks. N?=?173 grade eight students solved in dyads a physics laboratory task in one of three conditions. In condition A (unguided problem solving), students were asked to determine the mass of an unknown object by applying Hooke’s law. In condition B (laboratory guide), students received a guide which instructed and explained each solution step. In condition C (incremental scaffolds), the solution steps were presented incrementally on learner demand and were preceded by strategic prompts. Dependent variables were learning outcomes (solution, retention, knowledge) and motivational learning experiences (basic needs, situational interest, deeper level processing). The laboratory guide (B) led to better learning outcomes (d?=?0.42) but lower motivation (d?>?0.38) compared to unguided problem solving (A). Incremental scaffolds (C) led to higher motivation (d?>?0.44) but similar learning outcomes compared to a laboratory guide.     

Minimization of students’ cognitive load in a virtual chemistry laboratory via contents optimization and arrow-textual aids

Education and Information Technologies - Virtual Chemistry Laboratories (VCLs) are used as an alternative to the physical laboratories, where users can enhance their performance for hands-on...     

Designing and coding with BBC micro:bit to solve a real-world task – a challenging movement between contexts

Education and Information Technologies - Designing programmed technological solutions (PTS) with programming materials has become a way to contextualise educational content related to PTS and...     

Analyzing children’s computational thinking through embodied interaction with technology: a multimodal perspective

Educational technology research and development - The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first present a methodological framework for the analysis of embodied interaction with technology captured...     

Predicting teachers’ continuance in a virtual learning environment with psychological ownership and the TAM: a perspective from Malaysia

Educational technology research and development - Psychological ownership (PO) is a sense of being psychologically tied to an object to the extent that it becomes part of the extended self. As...     

Bare bones,or a rich feast? Taking care with context in a data rich world

Providing a rich context has become a sine qua non of principled teaching of applied statistical thinking. With increasing opportunities to access secondary data, there should be increasing opportunity to work with rich context. We review the contextual information provided in 41 data sets suitable for introductory tertiary statistics teaching, available in the R “datasets” package, and investigate the source information for four data sets. We find failure to describe and retain important contextual information, including aspects that raise questions about the credibility of the data for statistical inference. The sanitization of data reduces the opportunities for learning meaningful lessons in statistical thinking and the real-world application of statistics. We advocate for teachers and users of such data to be curious about the provenance and context, and for the curators and distributors to examine, where possible, the primary sources, to accurately preserve the context and optimize pedagogical opportunities.     

Revisiting “Play”: Analyzing and Articulating Acts of Inquiry

The early childhood profession needs to establish a different discourse to describe what has been referred to as play in early childhood. The authors draw from literature on inquiry theory to provide a theoretical lens for discussion and offer a model for inquiry through the Project Approach for the early childhood setting. The authors posit that early childhood educators need to clarify and extend the definition of play by distinguishing between play that occurs outside of the classroom as opposed to play that occurs as part of classroom curriculum. Further, educators need to develop the language for analyzing acts of inquiry and articulating these processes to parents and the public. An examination of the inquiry process of one preschool learner offers one way to begin articulating classroom inquiry and demonstrates how each instance of inquiry is a complex, reflective, and semiotic act.     

Investigating Students’ Explanations about Friction Concepts after Interacting with a Visuohaptic Simulation with Two Different Sequenced Approaches

Journal of Science Education and Technology - The current study investigates the differences in students’ explanations of friction concepts after the use of the visuohaptic simulation with...     

Conflict in the Movie “The Treatment” with a Cross-Cultural View

Analyzes the conflicting cases through which the movie develops its plot inspiring an inter-cultural thinking and argumentation from perspectives of attitudes towards law and its social factors, and the family values impacting the conflicts. The author proves the truth of the above two to be the primary causes with thorough analysis of the story details appealing to abundant consentaneous understandings and theories.     

Immersive virtual reality in STEM: is IVR an effective learning medium and does adding self-explanation after a lesson improve learning outcomes?

Educational technology research and development - The goal of the current study was to investigate the effects of an immersive virtual reality (IVR) science simulation on learning in a higher...     

Introduction to the special Issue “applied metacognition: real-world applications beyond learning”

Metacognition and Learning - Research in the area of metacognition is on the rise. Translating and applying the fruits of basic scientific results to various end-users and real-world scenarios is...     

Exploring online students’ self-regulated learning with self-reported surveys and log files: a data mining approach

Many researchers who are interested in studying students’ online self-regulated learning (SRL) have heavily relied on self-reported surveys. Data mining is an alternative technique that can be used to discover students’ SRL patterns from large data logs saved on a course management system. The purpose of this study was to identify students’ online SRL patterns with the use of data mining techniques. We examined both self-reported self-regulation surveys and log files to predict online students’ achievements and found using log files was more powerful in predicting students’ achievements in an online course than self-reported survey data. Discussions to enhance teaching and learning practices with the use of data mining are provided.     

Some Methodological Issues with “Draw a Scientist Tests” among Young Children

Children’s stereotypes about scientists have been postulated to affect student science identity and interest in science. Findings from prior studies using “Draw a Scientist Test” methods suggest that students see scientists as largely white, often unattractive, men; one consequence may be that girls and minority students feel a science career is “not like me”. However, a major shortcoming in prior research is that scholars have asked children to draw only scientists, thus making interpretations of earlier research findings ambiguous. We added other professionals to compare how 616 drawings of teachers, scientists, and veterinarians by 206 elementary school children varied by student gender, ethnicity, and grade. Students made clear distinctions: drawing teachers as most attractive and largely female, and scientists as most often male and least attractive. Aspects of the drawings suggest that scientists do have an “image problem” among children. However, large sex differences in the drawings and often‐unrecognizable gender figures in boys’ pictures lead us to question use of the “Draw a Scientist Test” as a projective test among young children.     

‘We’re keeping on top of the students’: making sense of test data with more informal data in a grade-level instructional team

Internationally, there has been a policy push for using student data for instruction. Yet, research has noted few examples of actually understanding how this data-use practice takes place. This study presents a case of an instructional data team making sense of student data. The study shares data to show how teachers’ process for using data to inform their instructional choices is an interpretive one. The study also highlights the fact that, to make sense of test data that are often incapable of capturing backstories of students’ work in school, teachers draw upon informal data that they glean from their observations of and interactions with students. The collective data in the heads of teachers emerge through data team discussions. We conclude with implications for policy, professional learning, and teacher development.     

“a bit”与“a little”用法之异同

“ａｂｉｔ”与“ａｌｉｔｔｌｅ”用法之异同李燕霞这两个词组从意义上讲都有“一点儿”的意思；从词性上讲ｌｉｔｔｌｅ是形容词，ｂｉｔ是名词；用法上，两者有时是同义词可以互换，有时却是反义词，意思正好相反。现将它们的用法归纳如下：１）两者都有名词的功能．在...