Minds-on: supporting the learning of science concepts and reasoning skills

Abstract

Minds-On is a novel, theoretically-driven pedagogical approach to support the teaching and learning of science concepts and reasoning skills inupper primary science lessons. Minds-On uses a hands-on – minds-on app- roach interleaving doing experiments with creating interactive concept diagrams. Lessons are fully orchestrated in the online application. Learners complete the lessons independently and receive guidance and feedback from the software. Four lessons have been created combining the following concepts and reasoning skills: seasons/cause-effect, sound/cause-effect, fixings & animals/classificationand bicycle/systems thinking. The approach has been developed using an itera-tive design method with evaluations in each phase either in the classroom or in laboratory conditions. Results from one classroom evaluation (N = 490) showed that both teachers and learners enjoyed working with the lessons, that learners are easily able to complete the lessons within the allocated time and that the app- roach enables learners to effectively apply several types of scientific reasoning and do so more autonomously than in traditional science lessons. Results from the knowledge questionnaires in a later study of the sound lesson (N = 147) showed a significant increase in score compared to before the lesson. In this demonstration
paper, we present the Minds-On approach and associated application, discussing the design process, the theoretical principles on which our approach is based and the preliminary results from recent classroom evaluations.