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Learning Science: Conceptual Learning and
Hands-On Design Activities

March 2008

Sadhana Puntambekar

Research has pointed out the important role of language in science. Reading, writing, and communicating are essential aspects of helping students construct science understanding. Yet informational text is seldom used to complement the rich and interactive nature of hands-on activities in science classrooms.

UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar helps teachers improve students’ conceptual learning by integrating informational text with experimental and hands-on activities. Her research project, CoMPASS: Integrating Digital Text in Design-Based Science Classes, aims to help teachers better understand students' changing representations of science concepts as they use multiple texts in their science explorations.

Hands-on activities allow students to experience and manipulate scientific phenomena and so are an integral part of project-based and design-based approaches to science learning. However, a concern has been raised that hands-on activities, despite their numerous strengths, may allow students to concentrate on the construction activities and build a working solution by trial and error without understanding the underlying deep science principles and phenomena. Puntambekar’s research integrates a hypertext system, CoMPASS, into design-based science units. Here’s a snapshot of its use in a classroom.

Learning About Inclined Planes

Josie in is 6th grade. Winter break has just ended and Josie is excited about going back to school. She is especially looking forward to science class. Before break, the teacher, Ms. Atkins, told the class they would start a new unit on simple machines. Ms. Atkins explained that this unit would include a lot of group work, inquiry projects, hands-on investigations, and technology. This is the kind of science that Josie learns best from and loves.

As science class begins, Ms. Atkins helps students to form small groups. Josie, Juan, and Carl are friends and are happy that they will be able to work together. Ms. Atkins describes their inquiry project: A friend is giving them a mini pool table to borrow for a birthday party. They need to figure out how to get the pool table inside a large van using an inclined plane using as little effort as possible, since it is too heavy to lift and carry by hand. The teacher shows the class the materials that they will be able to use to test out their ideas: a block that is 25 cm high to represent the back of the van, a brick to represent the pool table, wooden boards of different lengths, and plastic wrap, wax paper, sandpaper and aluminum foil so they can experiment with different surfaces to see which makes it easiest to push the table up.

Before Josie and the rest of her group are able to do any testing, Ms. Atkins asks the students to make predictions and to ask questions about the inclined plane. Josie thinks that the medium length board will work best. Carl and Juan think that the short one will be better. They decide that they need to learn more about inclined planes and wonder how they can be used to reduce effort when lifting something that is really heavy. Everyone in the group agrees that aluminum foil will make it easier to slide the pool table up into the van. Fortunately, Josie and her group are able to conduct some research on the computer before testing their ideas. Ms. Atkins has shown them how to explore the CoMPASS hypertext system which contains a wealth of information about physics and simple machines such as inclined planes (see Fig. 1).

The CoMPASS Environment

The CoMPASS screens show boxes with labels such as force, gravity, energy, and work. Lines connect these boxes to form a concept map. Josie and friends click on the boxes to bring up explanations of what the terms mean. These explanations make sense to Josie’s group because they refer directly to the experiment that they are trying to set up and learn about. When students click on the links between different terms, explanations of how these ideas are connected appear on the screen.

Josie enjoys using the computer to conduct research to answer her own questions. She, Carl, and Juan find the information they need to confirm or deny the predictions they make, as well as finding answers to their questions. They also make choices about how they will set up their own experiment to reduce the effort needed in moving the pool table into the van.

Josie’s group as well as the other groups in the class take notes about what they learned on CoMPASS. Then they test different surfaces by placing pieces of aluminum foil and plastic wrap flat on the ground to see which surface makes it easier to slide the mini pool table across. Then they set up different lengths of wooden boards on the 25 cm high block to see how the different lengths of boards affect the amount of effort that is needed to pull the brick up the ramp.

Josie remembers what Ms. Atkins always tells them about recording data. She tries to be accurate and write everything down as they conduct their experiments. She knows that Ms. Atkins will ask them what they found out from doing the experiment and the data will be important in explaining what her group learned.
After all of the groups conduct their experiments, Ms. Atkins helps the students to share their findings in a class discussion. Ms. Atkins asks the groups to explain which kind of surface and what length of board worked best, and why. Josie and friends had thought about different explanations and had written them down before sharing with the rest of the class.

As groups explain what they learned, Ms. Atkins helps them to understand more about forces, such as gravity, which makes it hard to lift the table up, and friction, which makes it hard to push the table along a board. She also tells them about the notion of energy and doing work by expending energy.

Josie and the rest of the class learn a great deal about the inclined plane and the nature of scientific investigations. Josie likes to learn in this way because she feels like a scientist herself: asking questions, conducting research, doing experiments, and communicating her findings to the rest of the class. She and her group can’t wait until the next class when they get to conduct another investigation and learn about the lever!

Research Results

To date, the CoMPASS material shave been used by over 3000 middle schools students. Results showed that students gained a deeper understanding of the connections between the science concepts and principles when they used the concept maps in the CoMPASS. A large part of the work on CoMPASS has focused on supporting students to (a) learn from the often abstract descriptions of science phenomena in the text and the concrete representations of those phenomena in hands-on investigations, (b) understand the connections between the science phenomena they are learning about (e.g., the tradeoff between force and distance in an inclined plane), and (c) learn how these phenomena are similar or different across different topics (e.g., the relationship between force and distance in an inclined plane and a pulley). Based on studies in classroom, the CoMPASS research team built support that helped students to (a) select concepts based on their goals when they read text in the CoMPASS system, (b) decide which concepts were related to the one they were currently reading about, and (c) understand the nature of the relationships between concepts. Analysis of teacher strategies helped understand that the support provided by an expert teacher helped students (a) connect a present topic to topics learned earlier, (b) maintain focus on the main goal during all activities, (c) make connections between hands-on (design) investigations and digital text, and (d) revisit big ideas and science principles across contexts.

Teachers participate in a summer workshop to learn how to use the CoMPASS materials in the classroom. For more information visit the CoMPASS Web site.

Puntambekar’s research has been supported by early CAREER, IERI and NSDL grants from the National Science Foundation.