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Virtual labs provide space for students to iteratively test, observe, and revise their understanding so as to improve their scientific literacy. However, one of the challenges that students face is that they need to think and act like scientists so as to be sensitively alert to methodological flaws and various sources of error. This study thus compared the effect of two instructional approaches using a virtual lab to enhance students' scientific literacy. Before students were given the opportunity to conduct science inquiries with the virtual lab, they were required to critique problematic inquiry cases (the critique group) or watch teachers' demonstrations (the teacher demonstration group) before taking part in the inquiry. By analyzing data from 50 middle school students, this study found that the effect of applying virtual labs can be augmented by an instructional design that engages students in critiquing experiments prior to their inquiry with the virtual lab. This study also found a limitation of the use of virtual labs in helping students transfer what they have learned from the teacher's demonstration to new inquiry contexts. A close relation among scientific literacy post-test scores, critiquing performance, and inquiry performance in the inquiry activity was detected, suggesting that student critiquing prior to inquiry is in alignment with the goal of developing students' inquiry skills and scientific literacy with virtual labs.

Background: Collaborative computer simulations are available on some online platforms which support students at distributed locations to synchronously collaborate on the simulations to learn sciences. However, how students collaborate with each other in collaborative simulations is not clear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate whether functional interdependency would influence learning. Methods: Two collaborative learning models with different functional interdependencies were examined (the synchronous model and the distributed accountability model). Multiple data sources obtained from 64 students were collected and analyzed. We discuss the collaborative learning with two levels of factors: the individual-level factors (i.e., individual perceptions of teamwork quality, visual attention and learning performance before and after a simulation activity) and the pair-level factors (i.e., discourse data and joint attention). Given that the pair-level factors in the collaborative learning environment may affect the individual-level factors, we further discuss the interactions of the two levels of factors in different collaborative learning models with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis. Results and Conclusions: The analytical results of the individual-level factors found participants in the distributed accountability model demonstrated more frequent and longer attention to the learning activity. Furthermore, the results indicated that the two simulation learning activities would enhance the participants' learning performance except in Q2. For the pair-level factors, the results demonstrated that the participants in the distributed accountability model showed more active discourse segments but similar joint attention patterns in the learning activity. The results of the HLM analysis indicated that the students in the distributed accountability model had to collaborate with their partners through more constructive dialogue, and focused on the same areas of interest to enhance their learning performance, as the complexity of the distributed accountability design was implemented in a simulation learning activity. Major takeaways: We found that the increase of functional interdependency cannot guarantee students' learning effect in collaborative learning and may hinder the communication that is needed during collaboration. Researcher may need to consider other collaboration tools to enhance the reciprocal reflection.

This study investigated students' modeling progress and strategies in a problem-solving simulation game through content analysis, and through supervised and unsupervised lag sequential analysis (LSA). Multiple data sources, including self-report models and activity logs, were collected from 25 senior high school students. The results of the content analysis found that the problem-solving simulation game helped most of the students to reflectively play with the science problem and build a workable model to solve it. By using the supervised LSA, it was found that the students who successful solved the game frequently linked the game contexts with the physics terminologies, while those who did not solve the problem simply relied on the intuitive knowledge provided in the reference materials. Furthermore, the unsupervised LSA identified four activity patterns that were not noticed in the supervised LSA: the fragmented, reference material centered, reference material aided modeling, and modeling centered patterns. Each pattern has certain associations with certain problem-solving outcomes. The results of this study also shed light on the use of different analytics techniques. While the supervised LSA is particularly helpful for depicting a contrast of activity patterns between two specific student groups, the unsupervised LSA is able to identify hidden significant patterns which were not clearly distinguished in the pre-defined student groups. Researchers may find these analytics techniques useful for analyzing students' learning processes.

Modeling of a natural phenomenon is of value in science learning and increasingly emphasized as an important component of science education. However, previous research has shown that secondary school students encounter difficulties when engaging in modeling activities and need substantial support in order to create meaningful scientific models. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to present the design of a technology-based modeling tool (Air Pollution Modeling Tool, APoMT) that supports students to engage in scientific modeling. The design of APoMT is based on theories and guidelines of scaffolding. APoMT decomposes a modeling process into manageable tasks, supports an increasingly sophisticated modeling process by integrating multiple variables into students' models, provides multiple representations to help students visualize data and relationships, and embeds expert guidance to help learners apply science content to modeling. An implementation study shows that combining APoMT with well-designed learning lessons could effectively support students' development of conceptual understandings and modeling abilities (Wu, 2010). (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

One issue facing teachers who implement model-based instruction within the school system is the tight curricular schedule. The 'lesson objective tension' calls for investigations to address instructional issues such as how to organise modelling-based instruction at the curriculum level which is across multiple units. We investigated the effect of the cyclic curricular design spacing out three modelling-based instruction units with virtual labs over three semesters, each involving 73, 181, and 150 junior high school students, respectively. Results indicate that, overall, the approach of modelling with virtual labs better promoted students' scientific literacy than the traditional instruction did. Specifically, students with low and moderate school science achievements benefitted more as shown in their scientific literacy scores than did the high achievement students. Furthermore, this study found that receiving one unit of modelling-based instruction may not be sufficient to promote students' scientific literacy, whereas the cyclic approach that suggests students receive two or more units of modelling-based instruction with virtual labs spaced over consecutive semesters had significant effects on promoting students' scientific literacy. The results provide insights into when and how modelling-based learning with virtual labs can promote scientific literacy at a curricular level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two-year study aimed to explore how students' development of different inquiry abilities actually benefited from the design of technology-infused learning modules. Three learning modules on the topics of seasons, environmental issues and air pollution were developed to facilitate students' inquiry abilities: questioning, planning, analyzing, and modeling. Two classes of seventh graders (13-14 years old) were randomly assigned to an inquiry group (n = 24) and a baseline group (n = 27). The two groups engaged in three technology-infused learning modules and conventional instruction respectively, and took two inquiry ability tests three times throughout two years. The test results showed that the inquiry group performed significantly better than the baseline group with respect to several inquiry sub-abilities. The instructional components of the tasks (i.e., design features) for which students exhibited significant improvements were further analyzed with respect to the task complexity, the function of the prompts, and the types of representations presented in the tasks. These design features identified provided useful insights into future design of technology-infused learning tasks for different inquiry abilities.

So far relatively little research in education has explored the pedagogical and learning potentials of applications (Apps) on tablet PCs (TPCs). Drawing upon research on learning technologies and taking an embodied perspective, this study first identified educational functionalities of TPCs and generated guidelines to design educational Apps for science learning. Following the guidelines, two Apps were developed and their effects on students' science learning were examined. A total of 61 11th graders from 3 classes in a public senior high school participated in instructional activities using the Apps. The test results showed a significant improvement in the students' conceptual understanding of the projectile motion and collision of moving objects. The results also suggest that the implementation of the Apps was particularly useful for the students' understanding of advanced concepts. This study could extend current understandings of how mobile technologies support reform-based science teaching and learning.

There is a distance between the power that whole class dialogic discussions (WCDD) may offer to the science class and their use in practice. Teachers' attitudes toward WCDD are part of the problem. The aims of this study were twofold: (a) to examine Taiwanese physics teachers' attitudes toward WCDD by considering cultural perspectives and describe how these attitudes changed as a result of a special workshop designed for this purpose, and (b) to report on how these attitudes should be taken into account in designing such workshops in the future. Nine experienced physics teachers participated in the WCDD workshop. The workshop was based on the WCDD model developed by Eshach (2010). Inductive analyses were performed on interviews with the teachers and their students, which were composed of 36 questions and developed specially for the purpose of this study, yielded the following categories: (1) In-school reasons for opposing WCDD--reasons belonging to school ways/tradition of teaching that may cause barriers to WCDD implementation; (2) External Factors--cultural reasons relating to Taiwanese views concerning education in general, which cause barriers to WCDD implementation; and (3) Cognitive aspect--refers to what teachers know about WCDD. The paper concludes with a discussion on what should be done in order to successfully bring WCDD to the Taiwanese physics class.

With the near-overload of online information, it is necessary to equip our students with the skills necessary to deal with Information Problem Solving (IPS). This study also intended to help students develop major IPS strategies with the assistance of an instructor's scaffolding in a designed IPS course as well as on an Online Information Management (OIM) interface. Explicit strategies that students employed to organize information for final projects were identified and hierarchically leveled based on the cognitive complexity they required. Results from a correlation analysis showed a significantly positive relationship among students' project scores, IPS strategies (e.g. organizing information in a logical way), and explicit strategies (e.g. search terms), but no significant relationship involving implicit strategies. Further examinations showed the students with higher project scores had advanced IPS and implicit strategies, while those with intermediate or lower scores likely over- or under-estimated their utilisation of implicit strategies. That is, self-efficacy surveys can be discriminative instruments if students have good self-monitoring abilities. Another feature of the students with high proficiency on IPS was the use of full sentences when using search engines, which implied less demands for the exactitude in search term selection due to the advances of search engines.

Although there is a broad agreement among scientists and science educators that students should not only learn science, but also acquire some sense of its nature, it has been reported that undergraduate students possess an inadequate grasp of the nature of science (NOS). The study presented here examined the potential and effectiveness of Nobel Prize stories as a vehicle for teaching NOS. For this purpose, a 36-hour course, "Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize and the Nature of Science," was developed and conducted in Taiwan Normal University. Ten undergraduate physics students participated in the course. Analysis of the Views of Nature of Science questionnaires completed by the students before and after the course, as well as the students' own presentations of Nobel Prize stories (with an emphasis on how NOS characteristics are reflected in the story), showed that the students who participated in the course enriched their views concerning all aspects of NOS. The paper concludes with some suggestions for applying the novel idea of using Nobel Prize stories in physics classrooms. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

The purpose of this study is to understand in what ways a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environment supports learning about the causes of the seasons. The environment was designed to engage students in five cognitive phases: Contextualisation, Sense making, Exploration, Modeling, and Application. Seventy-five high school students participated in this study and multiple sources of data were collected to investigate students' conceptual understandings and the interactions between the design of the environment and students' alternative conceptions. The findings show that the number of alternative conceptions held by students were reduced except for the incorrect concepts of "the length of sunshine" and "the distance between the sun and the earth." The percentage of partial explanations held by students was also reduced from 60.5 to 55.3% and the percentage of students holding complete scientific explanations after using Lesson Seasons rose from 2.6 to 15.8%. While some students succeeded in modeling their science concepts closely to the expert's concepts, some failed to do so after the invention. The unsuccessful students could not remediate their alternative conceptions without explicit guidance and scaffolding. Future research can then be focused on understanding how to provide proper scaffoldings for removing some alternative concepts which are highly resistant to change.

Researchers in educational technology have searched for factors to explain teachers' acceptance and resistance to using technology for instruction. Among the many identified factors, however, organizational and school factors have not yet been explored and discussed. This study investigates the effects of school size on science and mathematics teachers' adoption of technology in classrooms. Using national survey data collected from 940 science and mathematics teachers at junior high schools in Taiwan, we employed factor analyses, log-linear analyses, and three-way ANOVA techniques to examine interactions among school factors and teacher factors. Results obtained from the log-linear analyses suggested that both the interactions of school region with school size and school size with technology users were needed to explain teachers' use of educational technology in classrooms. It appears that teachers at small schools were more likely to use technology for instructional purposes. Additionally, results of the study revealed that teachers at small schools tended to have positive attitudes toward technology use and that among users of educational technology in southern Taiwan, teachers at small schools designed and used significantly more instructional activities with technology. This study suggests that small schools provide a better environment for science and mathematics teachers to implement educational technology in instruction.

Sandholtz, Ringstaff, & Dwyer (1996) list five stages in the "evolution" of a teacher's capacity for computer-based instruction--entry, adoption, adaptation, appropriation and invention--which hereafter will be called the teacher's computer-based instructional evolution. In this study of approximately six hundred junior high school science and mathematics teachers in Taiwan who have integrated computing technology into their instruction, we correlated each teacher's stage of computer-based instructional evolution with factors, such as attitude toward computer-based instruction, belief in the effectiveness of such instruction, degree of technological practice in the classroom, the teacher's number of years of teaching experience (or "seniority"), and the teacher's school's ability to acquire technical and personnel resources (i.e. computer support and maintenance resources). We found, among other things, that the stage of computer-based instructional evolution and teaching seniority, two largely independent factors, both had a significant impact on the technical and personnel resources available in their schools. Also, we learned that "belief" in the effectiveness of computer-based instruction is the single biggest predictor of a teacher's successful practice of it in the classroom. Future research therefore needs to focus on how we can shape teachers' beliefs regarding computer-based learning in order to promote their instructional evolution. (Contains 7 tables and 2 figures.)

In this study we content analyzed the online discussion of several senior-high-school groups on a forum of a virtual physics laboratory in Taiwan. The goal of our research was to investigate the nature of non-course-based online discussion and to find out some useful guidelines in developing such discussion forums for learning purposes. We adapted Henri's framework and models (1992) for our analysis. The content analysis was conducted in terms of participation rate, social cues, interaction types, and cognitive and metacognitive skills. In this study, we compared the result patterns of two discussion conditions ("required" (R-)condition versus "non-required" (NR-) condition) of a non-course-based discussion forum and investigated how the quality of message content changed in the processes of discussion. In the R-condition, participants were required to reply to the thread before they were allowed to read other messages on the forum, whereas participants in the NR-condition were not restricted to this demand. The results showed that for both conditions, the most frequently involved interaction type was "direct response", and the most frequently used cognitive skill was "elementary clarification". Fewer participants of the R-condition strayed from the subject under discussion in comparison to the NR-condition. However, larger percentage of message content containing metacognitive components was found in the NR-condition. When taking the sequences of postings into account, we found that for the R-condition, the percentage of metacognitive component in the message content tended to increase in the up-third postings, whereas for the up-third postings of the NR-condition the percentage of non-cognitive components substantially increased. Overall, the results of our study indicated that the way in which participants used cognitive and metacognitive skills during the discussions was related to the discussion conditions. The initial requirement of reply fostered the use of cognitive skills, but it did not necessarily induce the use of high-level cognitive or metacognitive skills. We concluded that beside the discussion conditions the moderators' guidance would be influential in determining the quality of online discussion on a non-course-based discussion forum.

Background: Collaborative computer simulations are available on some online platforms which support students at distributed locations to synchronously collaborate on the simulations to learn sciences. However, how students collaborate with each other in collaborative simulations is not clear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate whether functional interdependency would influence learning. Methods: Two collaborative learning models with different functional interdependencies were examined (the synchronous model and the distributed accountability model). Multiple data sources obtained from 64 students were collected and analyzed. We discuss the collaborative learning with two levels of factors: the individual‐level factors (i.e., individual perceptions of teamwork quality, visual attention and learning performance before and after a simulation activity) and the pair‐level factors (i.e., discourse data and joint attention). Given that the pair‐level factors in the collaborative learning environment may affect the individual‐level factors, we further discuss the interactions of the two levels of factors in different collaborative learning models with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis. Results and Conclusions: The analytical results of the individual‐level factors found participants in the distributed accountability model demonstrated more frequent and longer attention to the learning activity. Furthermore, the results indicated that the two simulation learning activities would enhance the participants' learning performance except in Q2. For the pair‐level factors, the results demonstrated that the participants in the distributed accountability model showed more active discourse segments but similar joint attention patterns in the learning activity. The results of the HLM analysis indicated that the students in the distributed accountability model had to collaborate with their partners through more constructive dialogue, and focused on the same areas of interest to enhance their learning performance, as the complexity of the distributed accountability design was implemented in a simulation learning activity. Major takeaways: We found that the increase of functional interdependency cannot guarantee students' learning effect in collaborative learning and may hinder the communication that is needed during collaboration. Researcher may need to consider other collaboration tools to enhance the reciprocal reflection. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Collaborative simulations are helpful in making the learning process cohesive.The learning effects of functional interdependence in collaborative learning are under debate. What this paper adds: We examined collaborative learning models with different functional interdependencies.We discuss the collaborative learning with the individual‐, the pair‐level factors and their interactions Implications for practice and/or policy: The importance of decreasing cognitive load induced by simulation with high functional interdependency.It is necessary to increase participants' transactive and constructive engagement in collaborative models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fast sensor was used as a vacuum gauge to measure the transit time of a gas pressure through an acoustic delay line (ADL). The results were compared with the predictions of two theoretical models. We found that in the rupture pressure range of 10¹ to 10[sup 4] Pa, the predictions of Jean and Rauss' model, based on the assumption that the flow of gas be a gas fluid, set lower boundaries for the observed transit times; while the predictions of our model, based on the molecular motion, set the upper ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]