Park, Joonhyeong

Utilisation of instructional videos for science teaching has become more widespread due to the expansion of online teaching and learning environments and growing awareness of benefits of videos, such as enabling use of effective multiple representations. With this in mind, this study aimed to examine features of instructional videos for teaching scientific inquiry, a key element of science education, and learners’ engagement, a crucial issue in instruction in terms of representational strategies used. We analysed 16 instructional videos for science teaching generated by pre-service teachers. We found that the instructional videos tended to focus on posing a question related to a phenomenon and constructing its explanation conceptually rather than conducting investigations and interpreting the data. It was also found that there were alternations between providing relevant and conceptual resources and affording learners opportunities to answer questions verbally and visually to prompt their engagement. Various representational strategies, such as summarising, comparing, highlighting, sequencing, and presenting vivid phenomena, were also employed for better teaching scientific inquiry as a part of learners’ ongoing cognitive activities. Based on the findings, we argue that there is potential for using instructional videos for teaching science, considering representational strategies in terms of scientific inquiry and learners’ engagement.

This study examined the features of student-generated drawings to foster their understanding of sound transmission. In this regard, eighteen student-generated drawings constructed by the fifth and sixth elementary science gifted students were collected and analyzed. The students were asked to draw and explain sound transmission between a tuning fork and our ears. The researchers classified the types of student-generated drawings by focusing on `air particles' and `their interactions', which are invisible, and key ideas of sound transmissions, and then analyzed the features of the students' conceptions, as visually expressed in each type. Consequently, most students focused only on the collisions among air particles, the medium transmitting sound, without conceptualizing the particle vibrations, i.e., the back-and-forth movements of particles. For example, some students drew that the particles themselves vibrate, or the particles literally transmit vibrations as if handing over an object. Finally, the educational implications were discussed in terms of alternative conceptions for elementary and middle school students and how to teach sound transmission.