• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.44 no.1
• /
• pp.77-86
• /
• 2024

This study analyzed students' discourse and learning to investigate the impact of using Google Docs in science classes. The researcher, who is also a science teacher, conducted classes for 49 second-year middle school students. The classes included one using Google Docs and another using traditional paper worksheets covering identical content. Students' discourse collected from each class was compared and analyzed using Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). The findings indicated that in the class using Google Docs, the proportion of discourse related to task was higher compared to the traditional class. More specifically, discourse regarding taking and uploading photos was prominent. However, such discourse did not lead to peer learning as intended by the teacher. An analysis based on achievement levels revealed that the class utilizing Google Docs had a relatively higher proportion of discourse from lower-achieving students. Additionally, differences were observed in the types of utterances and connection structures between the higher and lower-achieving students. The higher-achieving students took a leading role in providing suggestions and explanations, while the lower-achieving students played a role in transcribing them, with this tendency being more pronounced in the class using Google Docs. Lastly, students' changes in perception regarding the cause of static electricity were visualized using ENA. Based on the research findings, this study proposes strategies to enhance collaborative learning using Google Docs, including the use of open-ended problems to allow diverse opinions and outputs, and exploring the potential use of ENA to assess the learning effects of conceptual learning.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.26 no.7
• /
• pp.813-825
• /
• 2006

The purpose of this study was to identify students' conceptions and their conceptualization traits in terms of the explanation of subjects: human, animals, and plants. A questionnaire was specially developed to make sure students' conceptions of evolution, students' explanation patterns with the five evolutionary explanations: creationism, internal will explanation, theological explanations, use and disuse explanation and natural selection after mutation and perceived ideas of evolution in terms of the genetic characters of human, animals and plants. 1,540 elementary, middle and high school students participated in responding to the questions. The data was collected and analyzed cross-sectionally by age. Results showed that students' evolutionary explanations were different among each subject: human, animals and plants. Students had concentrated with more 'theological explanations' than 'internal will explanation' and 'use and disuse explanation' about plant evolution. 'Natural selection after mutation explanation' was less represented in explaining human characters. This result showed that the anthropocentric thoughts had influenced students' evolution conceptions. Accordingly, as student's age, 'theological explanation' and 'internal will explanation' became least used in explaining the theory of creation. 'Use and disuse explanation' attained more representation in their explanation. In addition, the diversity of students' evolutionary explanations was getting less attention as age increases. Among youngers, 'theological explanation', 'internal will explanation' and 'use and disuse explanation' showed an even number of responses. The elders responded with more 'use and disuse explanation'. This result let us infer that 'use and disuse explanation' was strongly adhered to by student cognitive structures. Many students recognized that evolution was a kind of scientific hypothesis with little evidence. They have had a little interest in evolution and conceptualized it through informal educational sources. This study mentions that to teach evolution more effectively, teachers should make 'use and disuse explanation' adhere strongly to students' cognitive structure.