Reasoning from data: How students collect and interpret data in science investigations

This study explored the understandings of data and measurement that school students draw upon, and the ways that they reason from data, when carrying out a practical science inquiry task. The two practical tasks used in the study each involved investigations of the relationships between two independent variables (IVs) and a dependent variable (DV); in both tasks, one IV covaried with the DV, whereas the other did not. Each was undertaken by 10 students, aged 10, 12, and 14 years (total n = 60 students), working individually. Their actions were video‐recorded for analysis. In a subsequent interview, each student was asked to discuss and interpret data collected by two other students, undertaking a similar (but different) practical task, shown on a video‐recording. An analysis of the sample students' performance on the practical tasks and their interview responses showed few differences across task contexts, or with age, in students' reasoning, but significant differences in performance when investigating situations of covariation and non‐covariation. Few students in the sample displayed sufficient understanding of measurement error to deal effectively with the latter. Investigations of non‐covariation cases revealed, much more clearly than investigations of covariation cases, the students' ideas about data and measurement, and their ways of reasoning from data. Such investigations therefore provide particularly valuable contexts for teaching and research. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 748–769, 2004     

Practical work: Its effectiveness in primary and secondary schools in England

We report here on the first of two evaluations of a national project (Getting Practical: Improving Practical Work in Science—IPWiS) designed to improve the effectiveness of practical work in both primary and secondary schools in England. This first baseline evaluation of the effectiveness of practical work is based on a study of a diverse range of 30 practical lessons undertaken in non‐selective primary (n = 10) and secondary (n = 20) schools prior to the teachers undertaking a training intervention designed to improve their effective use of practical work. A multi‐site case study approach employing a condensed fieldwork strategy was used in which data were collected, using audiotape‐recorded discussions, interviews, and observational field notes. The analysis, based on work by Millar et al. and Tiberghien, considers what students do and think relative to what their teacher intended them to do and think. In both primary and secondary schools, the widespread use of highly structured “recipe” style tasks meant that practical work was highly effective in enabling students (n = 857) to do what the teacher intended. Whilst tasks in primary schools tended to be shorter than in secondary schools, with more time devoted to helping students understand the meaning of new scientific words, neither primary nor secondary teachers' lesson plans incorporated explicit strategies to assist students in making links between their observations and scientific ideas. As such, tasks were less effective in enabling students to use the intended scientific ideas to understand their actions and reflect upon the data they collected. These findings suggest that practical work might be made more effective, in terms of developing students' conceptual understanding—an aim of the IPWiS project—if teachers adopted a more “hands‐on” and “minds‐on” approach and explicitly planned how students were to link these two essential components of practical work. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1035–1055, 2012     

Does Practical Work Really Work? A study of the effectiveness of practical work as a teaching and learning method in school science

Many within the science education community and beyond see practical work carried out by students as an essential feature of science education. Questions have, however, been raised by some science educators about its effectiveness as a teaching and learning strategy. This study explored the effectiveness of practical work by analysing a sample of 25 ‘typical’ science lessons involving practical work in English secondary schools. Data took the form of observational field notes and tape‐recorded interviews with teachers and students. The analysis used a model of effectiveness based on the work of Millar et al. and Tiberghien. The teachers’ focus in these lessons was predominantly on developing students’ substantive scientific knowledge, rather than on developing understanding of scientific enquiry procedures. Practical work was generally effective in getting students to do what is intended with physical objects, but much less effective in getting them to use the intended scientific ideas to guide their actions and reflect upon the data they collect. There was little evidence that the cognitive challenge of linking observables to ideas is recognized by those who design practical activities for science lessons. Tasks rarely incorporated explicit strategies to help students to make such links, or were presented in class in ways that reflected the size of the learning demand. The analytical framework used in this study offers a means of assessing the learning demand of practical tasks, and identifying those that require specific support for students’ thinking and learning in order to be effective.     

Student and Teacher Perceptions of the Use of Multimedia Supported Predict–Observe–Explain Tasks to Probe Understanding

This paper discusses student and teacher perceptions of a new development in the use of the predict–observe–explain (POE) strategy. This development involves the incorporation of POE tasks into a multimedia computer program that uses real-life, digital video clips of difficult, expensive, time consuming or dangerous scenarios as stimuli for these tasks. The program was created by the first author to be used by pairs of secondary physics students to elicit their conceptions of force and motion and encourage discussion about these views. In this computer learning environment, students were required to type full sentence responses that were recorded by the computer for later analysis by the researcher. Other data sources for this study included audio and video recordings of student discussions, interviews with selected students and their teachers, classroom observations, and student questionnaires. This paper will report on some findings from the study, focussing on student and teacher perceptions of the computer-mediated POE tasks. The findings have implications for the effective use of multimedia to enhance meaningful learning in science classrooms.     

The use of humour during a collaborative inquiry

Studies show that teachers and students use humour when communicating with each other in a science education context. This study investigates the use of humour during a collaborative inquiry laboratory task on an undergraduate chemistry course and an undergraduate physics course. Seven groups of students working on a collaborative inquiry task were recorded on video. The videos were analysed utilising an analytical framework based on conversation analysis. During the tasks, humour was used in a dynamic way and the role of humour changed as the inquiry progressed. As expected, humour was used to create a group identity and to regulate negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, uncertainty, boredom and disappointment. Humour also had an integral role in collaborative decision-making, for example in proposing and evaluating new ideas. Awareness of how humour can contribute to the regulation of emotions and collaborative decision-making might help students and teachers to better utilise humour in inquiry and learning.     

Using an interactive platform to recognize the intersection of social and spatial inequalities

With the creation of interactive tasks that allow students to explore spatial ways of knowing in conjunction with their other ways of knowing the world, we create a space where students can make sense of information as they organize these new ideas into their already existing schema. Through the use of a Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) and data from Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA), students can explore the communities in which they live and work, critically examining opportunities and challenges within a defined space.     

Biology Curricula at Universities in the European Community

In literature, several processes have been suggested to describe conceptual changes being undertaken. However, a few parts of studies analyse in great detail which students' learning processes are involved in physics classes during teaching, and how they are used. Following a socio-constructivist approach using tools coming from discourse analysis, we suggest studying three processes of students' learning: (1) establishing links between ideas, (2) increasing the domain of applicability of ideas, or (3) decreasing the domain of applicability of ideas. Our database consists of video data and written worksheets of two students at the upper-secondary school level (Grade 10 [15-year-old students]) during a one-month teaching sequence about gas. Based on semiotic resources contained in oral and written language, we reconstruct in great detail all the ideas about gas expressed by both students during the entire teaching sequence. Our analysis deals with (1) how learning processes are identified based on the ideas expressed by students, and (2) how the three learning processes are used by the two students during teaching. Our results show that during the teaching sequence: (1) the emergence of the networks of three ideas is supported by networks of two ideas expressed previously by students; (2) both students express more networks of two ideas than networks of three ideas; (3) the process ‘increasing the domain of applicability’ of an idea or a network of ideas is very often involved; and (4) the process ‘decreasing the domain of applicability’ of an idea or network of ideas is rarely used by them.     

How do students learn to apply their mathematical knowledge to interpret graphs in physics?

This paper describes a laboratory-based program in physics designed to help students build effective links between the mathematical equations used to solve problems in mechanics and the real world of moving objects. Through the analysis of straight line graphs derived from their own data students have been able to achieve a considerable development towards a concept of slope, or gradient, and how it relates to the concept of proportionality, but they continue to demonstrate a great resistance to applying their mathematical knowledge to physics. A model designed to help us apply current research ideas to this problem is described. The work described in this paper was carried out at Dickson College, a government senior secondary college (Years 11 and 12) in the Australian Capital Territory, where the author taught physics and biology.     

Students’ use of the interactive whiteboard during physics group work

This paper presents a case study of how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) may facilitate collective meaning-making processes in group work in engineering education. In the case, first-year students attended group-work sessions as an organised part of a basic physics course at a Norwegian university college. Each student group was equipped with an IWB, which the groups used to write down and hand in their solutions to the physics problems. Based on a Vygotskian, dialectical stance, this study investigates how the students used the IWB in the group-work situation. From qualitative analysis of video data, we identified four group-work processes where the IWB played a key role: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results show that the IWB may facilitate a ‘joint workspace’, a social realm in which the students’ dialogues are situated.     

Secondary Students’ Understanding of Basic Ideas of Special Relativity

A major topic that has marked ‘modern physics’ is the theory of special relativity (TSR). The present work focuses on the possibility of teaching the basic ideas of the TSR to students at the upper secondary level in such a way that they are able to understand and learn the ideas. Its aim is to investigate students' learning processes towards the two axioms of the theory (the principle of relativity and the invariance of the speed of light) and their consequences (the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and length contraction). Based on an analysis of physics college textbooks, on a review of the relevant bibliography and on a pilot study, a teaching and learning sequence consisting of five sessions was developed. To collect the data, experimental interviews (the so-called teaching experiment) were used. The teaching experiment may be viewed as a Piagetian clinical interview that is deliberately employed as a teaching and learning situation. The sample consisted of 40 10th grade students (aged 15–16). The data were collected by taping and transcribing the ‘interviews’, as well as from two open-ended questionnaires filled out by each student, one before and the other after the sessions. Methods of qualitative content analysis were applied. The results show that upper secondary education students are able to cope with the basic ideas of the TSR, but there are some difficulties caused by the following student conceptions: (a) there is an absolute frame of reference, (b) objects have fixed properties and (c) the way events happen is independent of what the observers perceive.     

University Students' Strategies for Constructing Hypothesis when Tackling Paper-and-Pencil Tasks in Physics

The study we present tries to explore how first year engineering students formulate hypotheses in order to construct their own problem solving structure when confronted with problems in physics. Under the constructivistic perspective of the teaching–learning process, the formulation of hypotheses plays a key role in contrasting the coherence of the students' ideas with the theoretical frame. The main research instrument used to identify students' reasoning is the written report by the student on how they have attempted four problem solving tasks in which they have been asked explicitly to formulate hypotheses. The protocols used in the assessment of the solutions consisted of a semi-quantitative study based on grids designed for the analysis of written answers. In this paper we have included two of the tasks used and the corresponding scheme for the categorisation of the answers. Details of the other two tasks are also outlined. According to our findings we would say that the majority of students judge a hypothesis to be plausible if it is congruent with their previous knowledge without rigorously checking it against the theoretical framework explained in class.     

Potential Contribution of Digital Video to the Analysis of the Learning Process in Physics: A Case Study in the Context of Electric Circuits

We seek to demonstrate how digital video technology can contribute towards our understanding of the process of development of conceptual understanding in physics. We use digital video to analyze 4 brief Physics by Inquiry sessions with 2 groups of preservice teachers. The instances include independent group work and instructor-student interactions. Important insights emerge on the way students attempt to make sense of their observations and the way their initial ideas hamper the process of inquiry. Specific difficulties are identified that influence the learning trajectory. These are classified into categories, including epistemological, conceptual, and reasoning difficulties. Additional results demonstrate the crucial nature of careful guidance in inquiry-oriented activities and the variety in student responses to epistemological and other obstacles.     

Finnish students’ reasons for their achievement in classroom activities: focus on features that support self-regulated learning

The aim of this study was to investigate how finnish students explain factors that contribute to their achievement in classroom learning activities and whether these factors are related to support of self-regulated learning (SRL) in classroom. Over seven weeks, 24 primary school students were videotaped during their typical classroom activities in 28 lessons to capture moments when they succeeded in learning tasks. From the video observations, 62 episodes were edited and used in stimulated recall interviews in which students were asked to report the reasons they related to their achievement in learning situations. Data-driven content analysis was used to analyse the open-ended interview data. The video observation data were analysed and sorted into theory-driven categories in order to find out how SRL was supported in classrooms. The results showed that students describe achievement through the actions that they took in the learning situations, such as being able accomplish the task. The reasons given for their achievement dealt with ability to accomplish the tasks or doing academic activities in order to achieve in the task. Furthermore, the students recognised classroom activities that support SRL, acknowledging their contribution to their achievement, mostly through the support that they received from their teachers and peers.     

Development of students’ conceptual thinking by means of video analysis and interactive simulations at technical universities

Video analysis, using the program Tracker (Open Source Physics), in the educational process introduces a new creative method of teaching physics and makes natural sciences more interesting for students. This way of exploring the laws of nature can amaze students because this illustrative and interactive educational software inspires them to think creatively, improves their performance and helps them in studying physics. This paper deals with increasing the key competencies in engineering by analysing real-life situation videos – physical problems – by means of video analysis and the modelling tools using the program Tracker and simulations of physical phenomena from The Physics Education Technology (PhET?) Project (VAS method of problem tasks). The statistical testing using the t-test confirmed the significance of the differences in the knowledge of the experimental and control groups, which were the result of interactive method application.     

Understanding student pathways in context-rich problems

This paper describes the ways that students’ problem-solving behaviors evolve when solving multi-faceted, context-rich problems within a web-based learning environment. During the semester, groups of two or three students worked on five physics problems that required drawing on more than one concept and, hence, could not be readily solved with simple “plug-and-chug” strategies. The problems were presented to students in a data-rich, online problem-based learning environment that tracked which information items were selected by students as they attempted to solve the problem. The students also completed a variety of tasks, like entering an initial qualitative analysis of the problem into an online form. Students were not constrained to complete these tasks in any specific order. As they gained more experience in solving context-rich physics problems, student groups showed some progression towards expert-like behavior as they completed qualitative analysis earlier and were more selective in their perusal of informational resources. However, there was room for more improvement as approximately half of the groups still completed the qualitative analysis task towards the end of the problem-solving process rather than at the beginning of the task when it would have been most useful to their work.     

The effects of prior knowledge and instruction on understanding image formation

This paper reports on a study that was designed to investigate the knowledge about image formation exhibited by students following instruction in geometrical optics in an activity-based college physics course for prospective elementary teachers. Students were interviewed individually, using several tasks involving simple apparatus (plane and curved mirrors, lenses, and prisms). The diagrams drawn by the students and the verbal comments they made provide evidence that their knowledge can be described as an intermediate state, a hybridization of preinstruction knowledge (which is dominated by a holistic conceptualization) and formal physics knowledge. We infer from our data the core concepts and main ideas of the postinstruction students' hybrid knowledge. Finally, by comparing preinstruction and formal physics conceptualizations of image formation we argue that a strong type of knowledge restructuring (in the sense of Carey, S., 1986: American Psychologist, 41, 1123-1130; Vosianou, S., & Brewer, W.F., 1987: Review of Educational Research, 57, 51-67) is required for students to acquire the latter.