Fostering High School Students' Conceptual UnderstandingsAbout Seasons: The Design of a Technology-enhancedLearning Environment

摘要

The purpose of this study is to understand in what ways a technology-enhancedlearning (TEL) environment supports learning about the causes of the seasons. Theenvironment was designed to engage students in five cognitive phases: Contextualisation,Sense making, Exploration, Modeling, and Application. Seventy-five high school studentsparticipated in this study and multiple sources of data were collected to investigate students'conceptual understandings and the interactions between the design of the environment andstudents' alternative conceptions. The findings show that the number of alternativeconceptions held by students were reduced except for the incorrect concepts of "the lengthof sunshine" and "the distance between the sun and the earth." The percentage of partialexplanations held by students was also reduced from 60.5 to 55.3% and the percentage ofstudents holding complete scientific explanations after using Lesson Seasons rose from 2.6to 15.8%. While some students succeeded in modeling their science concepts closely to theexpert's concepts, some failed to do so after the invention. The unsuccessful students couldnot remediate their alternative conceptions without explicit guidance and scaffolding.Future research can then be focused on understanding how to provide proper scaffoldingsfor removing some alternative concepts which are highly resistant to change.