Learning About Seasons in a Technologically Enhanced Environment: The Impact of Teacher-Guided and student-Centered Instructional Approaches on the Process of Students' Conceptual Change

摘要

To explore the ways in which teacher-guided and student-centered instruc-tional approaches influence students' conceptual understanding of seasonal change, wedesigned a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) course to compare, by means of con-cept maps, the learning outcome of students in two groups: a teacher-guided (TG) class(with whole-class presentations) and a student-centered (SC) class (with individual onlinelearning). The participants were two classes of second-year senior high school students inTaiwan. Overall, the results showed that most students developed a deep and accessibleunderstanding of the reasons for the seasons after undergoing experiences provided by theTEL course. More importantly, it was found that, in this technologically enhanced environ-ment, the student-centered approach was more effective than the teacher-guided approachin altering students' alternative conceptions of seasonal change (F = 28.05, p < 0.001).The conceptual evolution of students in the two groups was plotted and compared. Theseplots indicated that, first of all, the cognitive processes of contextualization and sensemaking helped students re-examine their old ideas about the phenomena, leading them togenerate alternative conceptions and undergo both positive and negative conceptual change.The student-centered approach allows students to more freely test their own hypotheses inthe processes of exploration and modeling, and thus move from assimilatory to properlyscientific explanations.