Preparation and compilation of electronic content
Z. Rahbar; F. Ahmadi Kalateh Ahmad; M. Saidi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: The emergence of COVID-19 has brought about a sudden shift to e-learning and virtual platforms. Teachers play a key role in developing e-learning content. Hence, they must be familiar with the theories related to the cognitive constructs and e-learning principles to both facilitate ...
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Background and Objectives: The emergence of COVID-19 has brought about a sudden shift to e-learning and virtual platforms. Teachers play a key role in developing e-learning content. Hence, they must be familiar with the theories related to the cognitive constructs and e-learning principles to both facilitate the learning process and enhance the rate of learning and retention among the students. The cognitive load might increase unless the e-learning and experiential content is not developed according to the cognitive load theory, particularly for teaching physics as a field that requires multimodal presentation of the content. This might hinder the students’ learning and retention. In other words, if the principles of cognitive load theory are not observed in the design of electronic and multimedia content of course materials, the learning process will be disturbed and damaged due to the production of additional load beyond the memory capacity of the learners. The current study aimed to develop e-learning content for a concept in physics (e.g. pressure) based on the cognitive load theory. It further attempted to explore its possible impact on the learners’ levels of learning (knowledge, understanding, application) and the degree of their retention.Materials and Methods: The study adopted a quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design with an experimental and a control group. The statistical population included all female ninth graders in district 17, Tehran, the capital of Iran. The sample consisted of 120 learners via multistage stratified random sampling procedures. The participants were assigned to experimental and control groups. To gather the required data, a researcher-made test was used and its reliability was calculated via Cronbach’s alpha as 0.85. The students took part in a three-week virtual empirical sciences course comprising six sixty-minute sessions. Before offering the course, the educational objectives of chapter 8 of the empirical sciences textbook in the ninth grade related to the subject “pressure” were determined using the teacher’s manual and eliciting the experienced sciences and physics teachers’ expert comments. Then, their level of cognitive processing was identified based on Bloom’s taxonomy. The objectives were categorized into three groups of knowledge, understanding, and application. To analyze the data, analysis of covariance and an independent samples t-test were used via SPSS (20.00).Findings: The results of the analysis of covariance for learning levels (knowledge, understanding, and application) demonstrated that developing e-learning materials based on the cognitive load theory enhanced the learners’ levels of learning in the experimental group compared to those in the control group (P < 0.05). Moreover, the results of an independent samples t-test for the delayed post-test revealed a significant difference between the participants in experimental and control groups in terms of their degree of retention (P < 0.01).Conclusions: The findings implied that considering the principles of the cognitive load theory in developing e-learning materials for physics would positively influence the learners’ levels of learning and their degree of retention. Therefore, it is recommended to designers of e-learning content to consider the principles of cognitive load theory in the design and production of their content.
Modern Educational Approaches
G. Ahmady; M. Saberi; F. Ahmadi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Education in today's world has a different meaning from the past, so there should be changes in the attitude and teaching method of teachers. Nowadays, teaching basic sciences is of special importance, and this issue requires teachers to be taught new teaching methods that ...
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Background and Objectives: Education in today's world has a different meaning from the past, so there should be changes in the attitude and teaching method of teachers. Nowadays, teaching basic sciences is of special importance, and this issue requires teachers to be taught new teaching methods that make them learn these subjects better, including physics. Numerous studies have shown that increasing scientific reasoning leads to success in learning content knowledge. So, instead of considering several physics training courses to learn content knowledge, special teaching methods such as reasoning can be created in students with new teaching methods so that they can learn more spontaneously and keep pace with the development of science and technology. Formation. The relationship between teaching methods and the development of scientific reasoning has been extensively studied and it has been shown that the active teaching method enhances the abilities of scientific reasoning. Group discussion teaching is one of the methods of inclusive education that uses this method; learners actively participate in discussions and give them the opportunity to share their opinions and experiences with others. This article examines the effect of discourse-based education through group discussions on students' ability to reason scientifically in physics. Methods: This research is a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test with a control group. The statistical population is all 10th grade female students of the second year of high school in Isfahan in the 2017-2018 academic years. The sample of this research was selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method. Measurement tool, a test to assess students' ability to reason scientifically in physics as a researcher-made with a reliability of / 76. Using the opinion of experienced professors in the field of physics education, its questions were content narrated. Each question was designed as four options and students were asked to write their reason in a descriptive way to select the desired option to further examine their type of argument. To score, Miyazaki (2000) model is used, which includes four different levels of reasoning in mathematics. In this study, the total score of each student is considered as the level of his physical reasoning ability. Since the answers to the questions were asked descriptively, to reduce the effect of the teacher's judgment, Cronbach's alpha was used for the correctors, which was 0.82. Findings: In the descriptive statistics section, the studied variables were analyzed using statistical index tables, mean and standard deviation, and in the inferential statistics section, the research hypotheses were analyzed using analysis of covariance and Pearson correlation coefficient. The results showed that the ability of physical reasoning and inferential reasoning of students in the experimental group is higher than the control group, but teaching through group discussions did not change much in the level of inductive reasoning of students. Conclusion: According to the research findings, there is a significant and inverse relationship between the ability of both deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning in both groups of testing and evidence, meaning that by increasing the ability of inductive reasoning, students use less inductive reasoning to answer questions. Therefore, teaching through group discussion has been able to have a positive effect on students' reasoning ability in answering physics questions.
