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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 3
(June, 2009) |
Twenty upper secondary (16 girls and four boys) and four third-year university students (two girls and two boys) were interviewed using two diagrams and one animation. Consequently, there was an overrepresentation of girls (18 girls and only six boys) among the interviewees. The main reason for this is that girls were in the majority in the classes. In addition, 31 university students (16 girls and 15 boys) in their first year of studying biochemistry took part in an individual exercise, followed by a group discussion, centred on the animation of water transport. In the group discussions the students were divided into four groups in order to obtain groups of appropriate size, with 7-8 participants in each. The assignment to groups was made randomly, without any special connection to student performance.
Semi-structured, revised clinical interviews (Kvale, 1996) were used. The interviews were structured around the two diagrams of protein function redesigned from examples in text books used in upper secondary biology and chemistry courses, and the animation of water transport. Additional diagrams were also used, but the analysis concentrated on the diagrams of transport through the cell membrane and protein synthesis. The individual exercise and the group discussions focused on the water transport animation. In the interviews, the students were asked to interpret the visual representations using their prior knowledge. They were not given any specific information about the visual representations. All students were shown the same visual representations. Fourteen interviews also included the animation, which in some cases couldn’t be shown because of technical constraints.
The interviews lasted for approximately 45 minutes and were audio-recorded and transcribed in full. An interview guide, highlighting certain topics of interest was followed. However, since an interview constitutes a conversation between different individuals, no interview guide should be too rigid ─ see the discussion about the problems of structured interviews by Mishler, (1995) ─ and no two interviews can be completely identical.
The individual exercise consisted of a questionnaire connected to the animation and generated written task responses. The questionnaire contained two sections. In the first, students were asked to interpret the animation without any clues. The second section contained information about what process the animation illustrated, and questions probing student understandings of the process and links to other processes. In the group discussion the same questions were discussed. The group discussions were video and audio taped and transcribed.
