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.