Procedia Computer Science 00 (2009) 000000

Procedia Computer Science

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

World Conference on Information Technology - 2011

Student Construction Activity for Improved Learning: Effectiveness of Slowmation in the Learning of Moon Phases
Robert-Peter Devadasona, Seong-Chong Tohb a*, Merza Abbasc,
b,c

Research and Development Division, SEAMEO RECSAM, 11700 Penang, Malaysia Center for Instructional Technology and Multimedia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia

Abstract This study investigated the effectiveness of Slowmation as a construction activity in the learning of moon phases by pre-service primary school student teachers. One hundred and seventy-one respondents undertook a WebQuest on moon phases as a selfdirected learning activity: respondents in the treatment group were given Slowmation construction tasks whereas the control group was given Paper Sketch tasks. Both groups of respondents were intact class groups from two different groups of teacher training institutes. Prior to the learning activity both groups were given a pre-test on conceptual understanding, a cognitive ability test and a spatial ability test. The respondents were given one week to complete the learning activity which was followed by tests to measure conceptual understanding and perceived motivation. Effectiveness was determined by conceptual understanding and motivation. In addition, the interaction effects of cognitive ability and spatial ability on the treatment variable for conceptual understanding were determined. In terms of conceptual understanding, both the Slowmation and the Paper Sketch groups showed improvements. A greater score for conceptual understanding and higher positive perceived motivation were found for the Slowmation group. This result was only significant for motivation, however. Interaction effects of cognitive ability or spatial ability on conceptual understanding were not significant. Implications of these findings are elaborated.
Keywords: slowmation; constructionism; ICT; learning by doing; spatial ability

1. Introduction Developments in terms of the affordability, accessibility and availability of ICT to the education community have opened up a number of possibilities for its routine use for teaching and learning within the classroom and beyond. For instance, the current generation of learners is faced with the challenge of sieving data from the mass of information in multiple formats that is readily available on the Internet rather than depending primarily on the traditional textbook and teacher. This has made possible the realistic use of self-directed learning as an approach to teaching and learning in the classroom. An issue with self-directed learning for novice learners is that they face problems with monitoring their learning, especially when the learning material involves rich media. For example, Bjork and Koriat [1] suggest that learners face illusions of competence while monitoring their learning during study. Low [2] argues that novice learners, when learning from animations, tend to focus on perceptually salient features rather than what is important.
a

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +6-04-6533824; fax: +6-04-6576749. E-mail address: tohsc@usm.my; drobertp@recsam.edu.my; merza@usm.my

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One approach to making students process information from rich media effectively is through the use of activities that slow the learner to enable him/her to focus more deeply on the content to be learnt. Bjork [3] calls these activities desired difficulties, said to enhance learning. Exercises, tests, translation and construction activities are examples of the desired difficulties traditionally used by teachers. Construction activity, which is the subject of this research, resonates powerfully with the idea of constructionism as proposed by Papert [4], who argued that learning occurs more felicitously when the learner is engaged in the construction of something external... Student-generated drawing (or Paper Sketch) is an example of a construction activity normally used in the science classroom as learning and diagnostic activity [5]. With the increasing availability of technology in schools and students homes there have been attempts by teachers to incorporate ICT-based student construction tasks as a learning and diagnostic strategy. Other examples include student-created electronic portfolios, hypermedia, digital videos and animation creation. Digital equivalents of student-generated drawings are student-generated videos/animations. The major problem with giving students video/animation creation tasks is that they are much more expensive, difficult to learn and time-consuming, although they have potential for sustained engagement like most ICT-based activities. That being so, student-created video/animation activities were normally limited to learning events that took at least three weeks, as in project-based learning. The availability of inexpensive digital cameras and extremely simple free video editing tools to students has made it possible for its use as a learning tool more often in the classroom as it takes a shorter time for perform these tasks. This has implications for both teachers and students because tasks which involve the use of such digital equipment and software are known to be highly engaging and motivating [6]. Hoban [7] developed a novel way of shortening the video/animation construction task even further that attracted an increasing number of followers. He called it Slowmation, which differs from normal video/animation production in two major ways: the use of digital cameras instead of video camcorders to capture individual frames/pictures of the animation sequence of an event or process, and the showing of these frames/pictures at a rate of about two frames per second. The potential advantage of Slowmation apart from time saving is that it reduces the amount of time spent by students on the technology and frees them to focus on learning. There has been a growing number of researches on Slowmation but they are primarily of the qualitative type [see for example 7, 8, 9]. Most of these studies report on respondents' experiences with Slowmation including cognitive and affective effects. This research is different from previous research in a number of ways: first, it is a quantitative study; second, it is done within the context of learning about the moon phases, which is an example of a dynamic event documented as inherently difficult to learn and prone to misconceptions; third, the focus is on its effectiveness as a desired difficulty task. 2. Purpose of Study The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of Slowmation as a construction task on conceptual understanding and motivation as well as its interaction with general cognitive ability and spatial ability in the learning of Moon Phases by pre-service primary school student teachers. Slowmation (treatment) was compared to another traditional construction task, Paper Sketch (control) as part of a self-directed learning activity in an online learning mode. This study is part of a larger study some of which are reported elsewhere [10, 11]. The research questions for this study were: i. Does Slowmation result in higher conceptual understanding? ii. Does Slowmation result in higher perceived motivation? iii. Will high and low ability student teachers benefit equally from the construction task? 3. Methodology The respondents were 171 pre-service primary school student teachers studying for a Bachelor of Education degree from four out of 28 teacher training institutes in Malaysia. Intact classes of student teachers who had majored or minored in science from these institutes were used. The respondents participated in a self-directed online learning activity on moon phases packaged as a WebQuest. The WebQuest was drawn from ideas proposed by its developer [12]. The WebQuest presented the respondents with a problem scenario together with a number of resources in the form of web links to help them solve the problem. These resources were in multiple formats including text and diagram/pictures, animations and simulations and contained enough information to allow the respondents to master the content. The teaching institutes and

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primary school curriculum were consulted to ensure the relevance and suitability of the content. The respondents were also allowed to search for resources of their own. This form of online learning activity is supported by constructivist theories of learning [13]. At the end of the learning activity, the respondents were required to do a construction (artifact creation) task assignment. Respondents from two institutes were given the Paper Sketch task (control group) whereas respondents from the other two institutes were given the Slowmation task (treatment group). The guidelines proposed by van Meter and Garner [14] for designing paper drawing tasks were used to guide the design of both types of construction task. Assignment of groups (Paper Sketch and Slowmation) to institutes was random. Respondents were expected to spend fewer than six hours total during a one-week period in October/November 2010 on this online activity, including the construction task assignment. To ensure that the Slowmation groups were familiar with this task, a four-hour workshop on Slowmation was given by the researcher in early October 2010. The briefing on the moon phases research included information on how to participate in the WebQuest as well as minimum expectations. The institutes that were assigned the Paper Sketch task were only given the briefing. The respondents were encouraged to do the construction activity in groups of two or three owing to time constraints (most of the respondents were going to sit their end-of-term exams in two or three weeks). Conceptual understanding and perceived motivation were the two dependent variables used and administered to all respondents. The Lunar Phase Concept Inventory, LPCI [15] was used to measure conceptual understanding whereas the Instructional Materials Motivation Scale, IMMS [16], was used to determine respondents perceived motivation. A scaled-down version of LPCI consisting of half the items but representing each of the eight constructs measured was administered as a pre-test to determine respondents' prior conceptual understanding as well as to determine if both the treatment and control groups were the same in terms of prior conceptual understanding. To study possible interaction effects with the treatment variable, cognitive ability as well as spatial ability was used with validated instruments [17, 18]. A number of interaction studies on learning from various media support the ability as enhancer hypothesis [19], where high-ability respondents tend to gain more from media and the common argument put forward is that they have enough cognitive resources left to process the extra information provided by such media (for example, dynamic motion). There is not much information on the interaction effects for learning by construction. A pre-test as well as general cognitive ability and spatial ability tests were administered to the respondents during a weekly tutorial session. When they came back one week later for their tutorial, the respondents were administered the post-test as well as the IMMS instrument. In this way all respondents from all institutes were allowed a similar amount of time to participate in the online learning activity. All the instruments were packed and returned to the researcher immediately after the post-learning activity. Only data from respondents who completed the pre-learning activities, posted the construction task assignment, and completed the post-learning activities were analyzed. Apart from basic analysis using descriptive statistics, this study employed inferential statistics to analyze data since hypothesis testing was involved. The level of significance was set to 0.05 (p < 0.05) and, since two dependent variables were investigated, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used. There were no violations of major assumptions in the use of MANOVA. 4. Findings To test if there were improvements in conceptual understanding scores, a paired-sample t-test was conducted to compare the pre-test and post-test scores for each of the Paper Sketch and Slowmation groups. There was no significant difference in conceptual understanding scores for the pre-test (M=3.97, SD=1.54) and the post-test (M=4.26, SD=1.75) for the Paper Sketch group; t(86)=1.136, p=0.259. There was a significant difference between the pre-test (M=3.48, SD=1.59) and post-test (M=4.51, SD=1.43) scores for the Slowmation group; t(83)=4.353, p=0.000. Note that the mean scores for conceptual understanding are low even for the post-test as the LPCI is designed so that the distractors mimic misconceptions held by students. In addition, under normal conditions, the construction tasks play a formative role in allowing the teacher to guide the student, which was not allowed in this learning task. To determine if there were differences in conceptual understanding scores and perceived motivation scores between the Paper Sketch and Slowmation groups, MANCOVA was performed. Since Wilkss Lambda was found to be significant, F(3,162) = 4.592, p < 0.05, it indicated that there were indeed differences for at least one of the dependent variables. In addition, the multivariate partial eta squared was 0.078 and the power of the test was 0.776.

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Two follow-up tests using ANOVA were conducted, one for each dependent variable, and consequently the acceptable significant level was reduced to 0.025. The results of the univariate ANOVAs regarding the outcome variables revealed no significant effects on conceptual understanding, F(1,164) = 2.027, p = 0.156 but significant effects on motivation, F(1,164) = 12.876, p < .025. MANCOVA was performed to determine if there were significant interaction effects between the construction tasks and cognitive ability. Wilkss Lambda was found to be not significant, F(3,162) = 0.226, p= 0.878 and no follow-up univariate tests were conducted to take into account issues of family-wise error. MANCOVA was also performed to determine if there were significant interaction effects between the construction tasks and spatial ability. Wilkss Lambda was found to be not significant, F(3,162) = 1.214, p= 0.307 and therefore no follow-up univariate tests were necessary. 5. Discussion Student misconceptions are generally difficult to address adequately since they are resistant to change. The literature suggests that addressing misconceptions is a long-term process where relevant experiences are provided progressively to reach a desired level of correct conception of the moon phases [20]. This accounts for the low conceptual understanding scores for this study. Taking that into account, both Paper Sketch and Slowmation were successful in reducing student misconceptions, resulting in higher conceptual understanding scores. This finding supports a number of qualitative findings of increased understanding in Slowmation studies [8, 9]. The Slowmation group had a higher conceptual understanding score (fewer misconceptions) than the Paper Sketch task group but this main effect was not significant, thus offering no evidence that any of the construction tasks was better than the others in terms of increasing conceptual understanding. The Betrancourt and Tversky study [21] on learning from animation (dynamic) and learning from diagrams (static) offers similar parallels. It is common knowledge among educators that a motivating experience enhances the possibility of a learner putting more effort for a longer period of time into a task. Both the Paper Sketch and Slowmation groups had higher mean perceived motivational scores but the Slowmation group were more motivated (perceived) than the Paper Sketch group. This finding could be explained by postulating that learners perceived learning with tangible materials in a largely multimedia environment which involved digital photography, digital editing and digital video creation and it was more motivational than learning with 2D objects (sketch), although digital photography/digital scanning was required. This main effect was significant. There were no significant interaction effects of cognitive ability and spatial ability on conceptual understanding although high cognitive ability and high spatial ability respondents for both the Paper Sketch and the Slowmation groups showed higher scores in conceptual understanding compared with the low cognitive ability and low spatial ability respondents respectively. The moderating effect of spatial ability was greater for the Paper Sketch group although not significant. One way to interpret this result would be to state that there is no evidence that either Paper Sketch or Slowmation favored any groups in terms of cognitive ability or spatial ability. The mean scores, however, seem to suggest that the ability as enhancer hypothesis [19] applies to this study too. 6. Implications of the Study Since there is no evidence of the advantage of Slowmation over the traditional Paper Sketch in terms of conceptual understanding, it will continue to be a challenge to promote the use of Slowmation for teaching and learning among non-ICT experienced teachers who routinely use Paper Sketch in their science classroom. The motivation argument may be used to convince teachers of the benefit of using Slowmation as one of the strategies to be used in the science classroom. Many of the student teachers, when experiencing its use during the Slowmation workshop, immediately felt that Slowmation would be an effective strategy to use in the classroom. This could be seen by the large number of student teachers who expressed a desire to use it for teaching in the primary science classroom during practicum. Given the natural excitement shown by novice teachers who had the opportunity to use Slowmation, the results of this study will help these teachers to have a balanced understanding of what should be expected as far as the effectiveness of Slowmation is concerned. This is especially true when a growing number of teachers around the globe are beginning to use Slowmation as part of their arsenal of teaching strategies.

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