Making science come alive : Student-generated stop-motion animations in science education

Abstract: The availability of digital technology in classrooms does not only increase the possibility for teachers to present content in new visual and dynamic ways. This technology also offers students the opportunity to become cocreators of content in science classrooms. The dissertation explores, mainly through qualitative methods, the potential of student generated stop-motion animations in science education research and practice. This exploration is motivated by the challenges learners experience when they are introduced to abstract dynamic science concepts spanning several organisational levels in space and time. In addition, it emphasises the importance of multiple representations for communicating and reasoning about such concepts. This novel approach is used, in combination with a conceptual characterisation of students’ written explanations, to expand the knowledge about students’ conceptions of evolution by natural selection. The potential of a stop-motion approach to stimulate meaning making of evolution biology and redox-chemistry classrooms is also explored. The thesis consists of four studies and a comprehensive summary with an extended analysis and discussion of the results.In relation to students’ written explanations about the mechanisms of evolution, the student generated stop-motion animations express the same pattern concerning key-concepts connected to evolution by natural selection. However, the analysis of misconceptions in the student-generated animations resulted in interesting differences from written explanations. The globally reported misconception of essentialism (the idea that all individuals of a species share a common essence, and that this essence is what is changed in evolution) was represented in only a low proportion of the animations. On the other hand, another misconception was expressed more often in the stop-motion animation than in written explanations, namely evolution as an event. These findings support the view that students’ expression of different misconceptions is influenced by the context and representational form.The work reveals that generating stop-motion animations to explain scientific concepts is an engaging approach that stimulates students to explore their understanding in a creative and personal manner. The analysis of the videorecorded animation process showed that one important realisation expressed in the student dialogue was that a representation is symbolic and cannot be a picture of reality, as it then would lose some of its explanatory value. The design of the task, the forms of feed-back during the work process, as well as the nature of the science content are important to consider before the approach of stop-motion animations is used in the classroom. Otherwise, the potential for meaningful learning may be lost and the activity becomes at best a lesson in creating an animation, albeit a fun and creative one.