CONTINGENCIES IN STUDENT ACTIVITIES
Emma Petersson, Annika Lantz-Andersson & Roger Säljö
Introduction
While sceptics have been little convinced about the beneficial conse-quences that would follow from the introduction of IT in school, tech-nophiles have continued to make claims about how such resources will contribute to solving pedagogical problems of various kinds, including changing the role of the teacher (cf., e, g., Postman, 1979; Selwyn, 1999).
As Cohen (1988, p. 232) puts it: ‘Since the end of World War II, educa-tors, reformers, and school critics have seized on one technical innova-tion after another, seeing fabulous opportunities for better educainnova-tion in each’. One example of this line of argumentation is the repeated claim that it would be possible to individualize instruction by designing tools that would be self-instructive for learners with different cognitive abilities and/or learning styles. In our opinion, any claims about the beneficial effects of technologies must be substantiated through research and critical scrutiny of the practices that such resources afford. One persistent prob-lem is the simplified view of learning adhered to in debates. Learning is often understood in terms of a straightforward conduit or transfer meta-phor. ‘Too often, technology is viewed as a way of automating education and reducing costs, without changing the traditional view of education as the transfer of facts from an authoritative source to a relatively pas-sive student’s memory’ (Stahl, 2009, p. 2). However, developing people’s ability to read, to express themselves in writing, to learn mathematical
modelling, or to analyse complex problems is not primarily a matter of presenting and absorbing information. On the contrary, this is a minor part of the teaching and learning process.
Even if one does not adhere to the idea of the revolutionary impact of technologies on learning, it is obvious that students’ constant access to mobile digital tools such as computers, smartphones, and tablets chal-lenges both the traditional media used in schools, primarily textbooks, and the instructional practices designed according to the principles of print technology. Today, for example, the learning of science in areas such as astronomy, physics, the life-sciences, and many other fields may be supported by a range of digital tools and applications, many of which are free on the Internet (cf. below). Such artefacts open up new ways of making knowledge accessible if embedded in well-planned institutional arrangements; they provide new ‘access points’ to human experiences and knowledge as Giddens (2002; cf. Säljö, 2010) puts it.
One of the areas in which recent digital technologies open up new avenues of exploration and learning is environmental science (see Fauville et al., 2013, for a literature review on the use of ICT in environmental education). This multidisciplinary field poses one of the most important challenges to the educational system to engage in, given the threats to the environment posed by human exploitation of resources. Since the 1970s, environmental education is compulsory in primary and lower secondary education in Europe (UNESCO, 1975). Questions about environmental awareness, for example, those that concern the use of resources, the im-pact of human activities on the climate, or, what we will address in this study, issues that concern ocean acidification, are not easy to understand for most citizens. These issues are complex from a knowledge point of view and require insights into natural science, law, politics, social science, and many other areas. In the literature, the term socioscientific issues is often used to refer to this type of problem.
The aim of the present study is to explore virtual labs as a context for learning about ocean acidification. In particular, we are interested in the activities that evolve when students engage in virtual lab work. Our question concerns what the consequences are for interaction and knowl-edge-sharing between students in such contexts.
Learning through virtual experiments
Experimentation serves as a basic mechanism of scientific work applica-ble to many fields. Learning about experimentation as a mode of inqui-ry implies understanding how experiments are organized, how they are carried out, and what characterizes experiments as a mode of generating knowledge in relation to a particular problem (Laugksch, 2000; Norris
& Philips, 2003). This is the core of an argument made by Dewey (1966) a hundred years ago: if students learn how scientists formulate questions and study them, they will develop an understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge in a more general sense. Dewey’s point is that stu-dents should not just learn about the products of research, they should also learn some of the procedures that go into scientific work as a mode of inquiry. Learning about experimentation implies familiarizing oneself with specific procedures for organizing knowledge generating practices as well as a particular language for how to observe and codify the world in scientifically relevant manners (Wickman, 2004). This includes insights into procedures such as how to do laboratory work, how to formulate issues and convert them into hypotheses, how to manipulate variables, interpret data and communicate findings. An essential part of learning about experimentation is also to familiarize oneself with the concepts and categories that are relevant for organizing such activities, such as sample, control group, observation, variable, etc. (Lemke, 1990, 2004; Welling-ton & Osborne, 2001; Wickman, 2002).
Virtual labs: affordances and limitations
On the Internet there are, by now, many resources for engaging in vir-tual science work, including performing virvir-tual experiments. There is an intense technical development, where major players in science, such as NASA,12 large science museums and other institutions take active part.
Such tools make it possible to perform activities such as simulating and modeling earthquakes, dissecting frogs, transplanting hearts, exploring and manipulating cells, and engaging in a wealth of virtual activities, in-cluding discovering the details of Nobel Prize- winning breakthroughs.13
12 http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/about/tech_prod_e_edu_overview.html 13 For access to tools, see, e.g., http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/virtual.php
Digital tools offer opportunities for students to engage in inquiry learning activities that in some ways are reminiscent of those practised by scientists (for an extended literature review, see Bell et al., 2010; Gordin
& Pea, 1995). Most research on virtual labs within the field of education has primarily focused on the design of such tools (cf. Furberg, 2010). For example, Ramasundaram et al. (2005) and Heermann and Fuhrmann (2000) developed virtual laboratories with the aim of enhancing students’
learning. The authors argue that the virtual tools improve learning as they offer better instructional opportunities compared to traditional teach-ing (Ramasundaram et al., 2005), and they may also increase students’
motivation (Heermann & Fuhrmann, 2000). In a study targeting the implementation of a virtual science laboratory to investigate the effect on different learning styles, Sun, Lin and Yu (2008) analysed 132 students from four fifth-grade classes. The participants were divided into an ex-perimental group using virtual lab teaching, and a control group, where traditional classroom teaching took place. The results showed that the students in the experimental group performed better than the students in the control group. In line with the results of Sun et al. (2008), Gibbons et al. (2004) tested whether using virtual labs within the area of learning chromosome analysis and bioinformatics could improve students’ learn-ing. The students in this study were divided into two groups, where one of the groups received traditional teaching, while the other group worked with virtual labs. The results showed that the virtual labs were much less time consuming than traditional teaching, and that the decrease in time did not influence students’ performance.
As added advantages of instructional significance, virtual labs offer possibilities for students to perform experiments that would need to run over a long time, or that would be dangerous or impossible to perform in schools for practical reasons (Dalgarno et al., 2009; Zacharia, 2008;
van Joolingen et al., 2007). Virtual labs are also time and cost effective, and they are relatively easy to integrate into regular teaching activities.
Students can work with them independently and at their own pace. Since the experiment may be paused, students can continue next week in class.
It is reasonable to assume that such affordances will contribute to making virtual labs popular in education.
As mentioned above, most research has focused on the design of
virtual tools and, to some extent, on the consequences for learning out-comes. Pedagogical traditions and social practices of schooling, though, are complex and have to be taken into account; the lesson learned over time is that technologies per se do not necessarily change instructional patterns (Cuban 1986). Now there already are many virtual labs available on the Internet and elsewhere, but very few seem to be integrated into schooling on a regular basis. Furthermore, studies that analyse students’
reasoning and discussion in such activities point out that virtual labs may convey a simplified picture of scientific work. Such a simplified picture will hinder rather than support students’ development of knowledge of the practices of research and science (cf. Chen, 2010; Karlsson & Ivars-son, 2008).
Virtual labs as sites of learning in environmental science
The background of this study is an interest in analysing how instructional work is organized in the context of a virtual lab. Thus, we see this as an empirical question where the engagement of students and teachers must be explored in situ. To describe and analyse the instructional practices, a socio-cultural-historical perspective on learning has been adopted (Vy-gotsky, 1978; Wells, 1999; Wertsch, 1998). This means that we regard instruction and learning as embedded in institutional traditions of com-munication and as mediated through the use of artifacts. This analyt-ic agenda implies that people, institutional contexts, tools, and cultural constructions of tools, are constitutive and inseparable elements of an activity. As has been pointed out above and by Arnseth and Ludvigsen (2006), it is not enough to study how the tool is designed, since tools do not, as we have pointed out, determine instructional practices in a linear fashion. On the other hand, tools are not neutral; they invite and facil-itate certain activities while making others less likely or even irrelevant.
An interesting element of virtual labs is that they, through their design,
‘blackbox’ (Latour, 1999) many features of how they function. Blackbox-ing refers to
the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and
not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more sci-ence and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become (p. 304).
The blackboxed nature of digital tools, such as virtual labs, thus will have consequences for students’ engagement, the obstacles encountered, and the insights made. The analysis that follows has been guided by the following question:
What kinds of activities evolve when students engage in virtual lab work in environmental science?
Empirical study
A case study has been chosen to illustrate features of student engagement and teacher contributions to learning in the context of the virtual lab.
The empirical material has been analysed using interaction analysis (Jordan
& Henderson, 1995) with a focus on how the students communicate with each other, and how they interact with the virtual lab. In both cases, attention is also given to nonverbal elements. With its roots in ethnog-raphy, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and other traditions, the aim of Interaction Analysis is to identify how the participants make use of resources in the complex social context in which they act (cf. e.g., Crook, 1994; Stahl, Koschmann, & Suthers, 2006). By regarding interaction as activities that participants perform in order to accomplish something, the focus is on how participants make meaning and coordinate in practices.
Setting and participants
The study has been carried out as part of a binational collaboration be-tween schools in the USA and Sweden on issues of climate change in
a research project called Inquiry-to-Insight14 (I2I). In this specific case study, we have only used empirical material from a school in Sweden.
The school was engaged in networking activities using various media, and students had access to digital tools such as virtual labs and other digital media (e.g., carbon dioxide footprint calculators). The curricular context of the use of the virtual lab is marine biology, a subject of choice of the students included.
The virtual environment used is the Acid Ocean Virtual Lab (AOVL), which is briefly described below. The teacher in the current study had been introduced to the AOVL, developed within the project I2I, through collaboration with marine scientists. However, the teacher used the virtual lab on his own and as part of the regular teaching.
The empirical material presented in this article is part of a longer study including approximately 21 hours of video recording following a class of students in a Swedish upper secondary school. In this study we have analysed approximately five hours of video documentation, focus-ing on actions and interactions between students, and between students and the AOVL. The cameras were positioned on tripods behind the stu-dents in order to capture nonverbal activities. Additionally, the computer screens were recorded with the purpose of capturing students’ activities in the virtual lab (for a screenshot of video data, see figure 1). The teacher’s introduction of the lesson was also video recorded and analysed.
In the study, a class of 19 students worked with the AOVL during one period lasting three hours. The pedagogical goal for the activity was for the students to test the AOVL in order to learn about ocean acidifi-cation. The teacher started the lesson by giving an introduction to ocean acidification and its consequences (20 minutes). For example, the teacher wrote the chemical formula for ocean acidification on the whiteboard,
14 The Inquiry-to-Insight (I2I) project started in November 2008, and is a collaboration between Stanford University, California, USA, and Gothenburg University, Sweden, and their respective marine stations; Hopkins Marine Station and Sven Lovén Center for Marine Sciences-Kristine-berg. I2I offers an educational program combining ICT, social networking, and pedagogy di-rected at environmental issues. The I2I idea is to pair classes from different countries within a social network. The students compare views, attitudes, and life styles around three environmental issues (climate change, environmental pollution, and habitat preservation) and will increase their understanding of those issues with different educational tools mainly based on ICT. http://i2i.
stanford.edu/
described the acidification of the ocean, mentioned research results, and talked about the effects of ocean acidification on organisms in the oceans.
After this introduction, the students worked with the AOVL during the next 60 to 80 minutes. The students worked in groups of three to four, and they used a portable computer. The computer was placed in front of the student who sat in the middle. In general, the student placed in front of the computer also navigated the computer mouse. The teacher inter-acted directly with the students mostly when called upon.
Fig. 1. Screenshot of the video data where the film of the students and the screen recording of the virtual lab have been synchronized into one film.
Acid Ocean Virtual Lab
In order to understand the logic of the study, a brief presentation of the AOVL will be given. The AOVL is a digital tool where students get an opportunity to study acidification of the ocean and its impact on the growth of sea urchin larvae. It consists of three elements that the students attend to and use: 1) information regarding basic facts about ocean acid-ification; 2) lab sessions; and 3) measurement exercises and information about the consequences of ocean acidification. When entering the virtual lab, students are provided with some information about acidification of the ocean. This first part includes discussion questions and exercises. In the second part, students are given the opportunity to act as scientists by experimenting in a virtual lab session. The lab session is designed to
mimic a ‘real’ lab environment with equipment such as beakers, pipettes, a microscope, etc. (fig. 2). During the lab session, students get informa-tion about various scientific principles through ‘pop-up’ boxes, for ex-ample, regarding the importance of sample size and number of replicates in empirical studies. While experimenting, students also answer ‘pop-up questions’, which concern the specific activity in which they are currently engaged. For example, if a student adds carbon dioxide to the water, the pop-up question could ask the student about the motive for doing so. In other words, these questions are designed to make students justify actions and decisions, and to help them see the consequences of what they do.
In the virtual lab, students perform activities such as setting up rep-licate cultures and feeding the sea urchin larvae; they make water changes and observe changes in growth of the larvae over time under different experimental conditions. Every step (task) in the lab session is clearly described in two text boxes, and the equipment students are expected to use is highlighted in yellow. The students set up replicate cultures in wa-ter with regular pH level (8.1) and in wawa-ter with a lower pH level (7.7).
In the third part, the students measure samples of sea urchin larvae from both water types and make comparisons. The outcome is then related to statistical data from authentic scientific research. This measurement exer-cise is followed by information about the consequences of a decreased pH level that will occur through ocean acidification.
Results
The analyses below are based on students’ work in all three parts of the AOVL: information section, lab session, and measurement exercises. The excerpts have been chosen so as to illustrate shifting patterns of engage-ment that evolve when students are working with the different parts of AOVL. Thus, there are tensions in students’ activities where they contin-uously shift focus while working.
The excerpts are sorted in the same order as the three parts of the virtual lab, which means that Excerpt 1 illustrates how the students work in the introduction part of the lab, Excerpt 2 shows how the students ori-ent themselves in the lab session, and Excerpt 3 is an example of how the students work in the final part of the lab, the measuring exercise.
Student engagement as contingent on scientific content
The teacher organizes his introduction of the class activity in line with the academic content presented in the first part of the AOVL. To this rather abstract academic information, the teacher adds concrete examples. For instance, the teacher talks about consequences on marine larval organ-isms of acidification using clownfish as an illustration.
[Uhm] recently one has found out that certain fish, for example, lose their sense of smell, and that certain clownfish, which nor-mally recognize the smell of predatory fish and go hiding in the corals, do the opposite. When the ph is seven point six they swim towards the smell of predatory fish instead (.) That’s not very good cause then they will be eaten.
Fig. 2. Screenshot of the lab session in Acid Ocean Virtual Lab.