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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 9, Issue 2, Article 3
(Dec., 2008) |
According to the goal of scientific literacy, it is important to make non-science majors understand and appreciate science and technology. This study aimed for promoting non-science majors’ modeling ability and understanding of scientific concepts. The concept of the battery was taught in the course, so the concepts of battery were embedded in the modeling ability instruction. The quantitative method was chosen to to disclose students’ learning outcomes regarding modeling ability and scientific learning in this paper. In this section, the participants’ background, instructional design, instruments developed to evaluate the students’ learning outcomes and data analysis are all adopted in this study are described.
A total of 149 non-science majors were invited to participate in this study. They were composed of three different classes from three different departments in the International Trade Department (62 students), the Accounting Department (57 students) and the Applied Japanese Department (30 students). The participants were all freshmen who joined an 18-week course called the Introduction of Natural Sciences, which was a topic-oriented designed course and the goal of the course was to learn about sustainability initiated by The College of Liberal and General Education. The battery was one of the topics in this course. Three classes were randomly assigned to receive different instructional design methods which included: (1) CA + modeling ability instruction (62 students), (2) modeling ability instruction (57 students), and (3) control group (30 students). The instructional design is depicted in detail as follows.
The hypothesis of this study is that students could learn scientific concepts better after modeling ability instruction. Therefore, one experimental group (the modeling ability instruction group) was taught about scientific concept of battery via a video lab after introducing the framework of modeling ability. In addition, since CA has been known as a good instruction method for developing learners’ ability, all of the dimensions of CA were embedded in the modeling ability instruction in another experimental group (CA + modeling ability instruction) to see whether CA could enhance learners’ learning outcomes.
Since the course chosen to use in this study was a topic-oriented designed course, the instructional design for each topic was limited to a two-week long period of 200 minutes (four lessons in total). Hence, the three invited classes all experienced the 200 minutes of instruction in this study. The other three classes were randomly assigned to receive three different instructional designs, which were: (1) CA + modeling ability instruction, (2) modeling ability instruction, and (3) control group. The basic idea for CA instruction was to consider the characteristics of the four dimensions presented in Table 1 to help teach the concept of the battery. Regarding the modeling phase of the pedagogical methods in the theory of CA, since there is no science lab at the university, students watched a "video lab" showing a female scientist conducting an experiment of constructing a volt battery in a real lab. Coaching, scaffolding articulation, reflection and fading, and exploration were all embedded into the instructional design in the CA + modeling instruction group. The design of modeling ability instruction was based upon the framework of the three dimensions of modeling ability containing epistemology, ontology and methodology. Learners were presented the meaning and provided examples for each dimension in class.
Above all, regarding CA + modeling ability instruction, students received CA instruction and also modeling ability instruction meanwhile. However, students in the modeling ability instruction group were taught using modeling ability instructionin addition to the video labwhich lacked the modeling phase of CA theory. In the control group, the instruction was only to convey the concept of the composition of the volt battery by PowerPoint without any video and modeling ability instruction. Due to ethical concerns, a compensatory instruction was designed for the control group. That is, after finishing the whole instruction and evaluation, the control group students had an opportunity to watch the video lab and also learn about modeling ability. The detailed content of the instructional design is presented in Appendix I. As mentioned, this study was one subproject of a joint project. The instructional design was validated by the three other principle investigators in this joint project before teaching occurred.
Since the purpose of this study is to develop modeling ability instruction to promote students’ modeling ability and scientific concepts of battery, three kinds of instruments were adopted to evaluate students’ performance including the tests of: (1) general modeling ability, (2) concepts of battery, and (3) context-based modeling ability. In terms of general modeling ability, a Likert scale questionnaire was developed by other subprojects (Chiu, 2007; Chou, 2007; Wu, 2007). There are two sets of open-ended items developed for pre- and post-tests to evaluate participants’ learning outcomes on the concept of the battery (see Appendix II as concept tests), which were developed in this study. Besides the general modeling ability questionnaires used in this study, two sets of open-ended, context-based modeling test items were created by this study as pre and post-tests, to evaluate participants’ modeling ability in a specific context (see Appendix III as the context-based modeling tests). Global warming is the specific context designed for this context-based modeling test. The overall research design is presented in Table 2. To analyze the learning effect of the different instruction methods, the data collected from those instruments were analyzed further. Also, all the instruction was videotaped.
Table 2. The overall research design of this study
Designs
Groups
Pre-test
Instructions
Post-test
I
♦ General modeling ability questionnaire
♦ Concept test I
♦ Context-based modeling test I
CA + Modeling ability instruction
♦ General modeling ability questionnaire
♦ Concept test II
♦ Context-based modeling test II
II
Modeling ability instruction
III
Control group
According to the three kinds of instruments adopted in this study, students’ data regarding pre and post-tests were all collected. General ability questionnaires included 46 Linkert scale items and five scales for each item. In each item, is one to five points from very much disagree to very much agree. Each of pre and post concept test had 10 scores in total. Regarding context-based modeling tests, students could get a full of 4 scores for each test I and II.
In this paper, only the quantitative data is presented. ANCOVA analysis (SPSS 11.0) was used to analyze students’ performance of general modeling ability, concepts of battery and context-based modeling ability after three different instruction methods (CA + modeling ability instruction, modeling ability instruction, and control group). Furthermore, the Scheffe post-hoc test was conducted to understand the significance among different instructional designs after teaching.
