Effect of Instruction Using Animation Analogy on the Middle School Students Learning about Electric Current

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1 Journal of the Korean Physical Society, Vol. 38, No. 6, June 2001, pp Brief Reports Effect of Instruction Using Animation Analogy on the Middle School Students Learning about Electric Current Y. M. Kim and K. R. Ryu Department of Physics Education, Pusan National University, Pusan (Received 24 November 2000) The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of instruction using animation analogy on middle-school students learning about electric current. For that purpose, the effect of instruction using animation analogies was compared to the effect of instruction using pictorial analogies and to the effect of instruction without analogies, but measuring the electric current. For the experiment, three groups, 30 students each, were sampled from a middle school in Pusan city, Korea, and by the pre-test the students conceptions about electric current before instruction were investigated. Three kinds of instructional programs (instructional program with animation analogies, instructional program with pictorial analogies, and instructional program without analogies, but with experiment) for teaching electricity were developed, and they were used with the three groups one to one. By the post-test, the students conceptions about electric current after intended instructions were investigated, and their learning achievements through the instructions were analyzed. The conclusion is that instruction using animation analogies was more effective than instruction with pictorial analogies, but was not as effective compared as instruction without analogies, but with experiments, for the students learning about electric current. I. INTRODUCTION Analogies have played important roles in scientific development and science education. They have been used for creating new scientific concepts and for understanding and explaining abstract scientific concepts. However when they are applied to learning and teaching, they have some limits, and sometimes students perceive analogies themselves as science. Also, there is some research that analogies, when misused, cause of students misconceptions [1] and that abuses of analogies are the causes of increasing inert knowledge. Thus, they should be used carefully. Nonetheless, analogies have been used in many secondary science textbooks, including Korean ones, particularly for teaching electricity. Stocklmayer and Treagust [2] found that analogies had been used since the 1890s in science textbooks, particularly for explaining electric current. Kim and Park [3] found that analogies were used, on average, every 23 pages of Korean middle-school science textbooks. Many studies have found that electric current is very difficult for students to understand and that it is very difficult to change students alternative ideas about electric current into scientific ones. Therefore, electric current is taught mostly using analogies for elementary and sec- minkiyo@hyowon.pusan.ac.kr ondary school students. Analogies, when used for teaching physics, can be classified into three types by representation formats: verbal, pictorial [4], and real-object model [5] analogies. In this paper, we suggest that an animation-type analogy can be another type of analogy besides the above three types for teaching physics. We think animation can be useful for teaching physics in this age because we now live in an information society. Also, since using computer is so popular, animation analogies are not difficult to make or use. We think animation analogies may be more effective than pictorial analogies for students to understand concepts in physics. The terminology, animation analogy, has not been used in any other articles so far, so we have to define it. We accepted Duit s general definition of analogy [6] in this study, stressing a one-to-one correspondence between the target domain and the analgue domain, so here we define animation analogy as an analogy in which elements of the analogue domain are represented by animation. We have a strong hypothesis that animation analogies are more powerful than pictorial analogies for students to understand abstract and difficult physics concepts, particularly electricity concepts. Thus, in this study, we wanted to know if animation analogies can increase learning effects more than pictorial analogies. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether instruc

2 -778- Journal of the Korean Physical Society, Vol. 38, No. 6, June 2001 III. RESEARCH METHOD 1. Sampling Subjects The experimental research method was used in this study, so for the experiment, three classes were sampled, an experimental group and two control groups with each class size being 30, from a middle school in Pusan city, Korea. They are named class AAI, class PAI, and class NAI. Class AAI was sampled for implementing instructional program with animation analogies, class PAI was for implementing instructional program with pictorial analogies, and class NAI was for implementing instructional program without analogy, but with experiments. 2. Development of Instructional Programs Fig. 1. One of the (a) pictorial analogies for explaining the (b) electric current. tion using animation analogies is more effective on students understanding about electricity than instruction with pictorial analogies or instruction without analogies, but experimentation. II. RESEARCH PROBLEMS The research questions of this study are as follows: 1. Is animation analogy instruction more effective than pictorial analogy instruction for the students to understand electricity concepts? 2. Is animation analogy instruction more effective than instruction without analogy, but with experiments, for students to understand electricity concepts? For electric circuits, three instructional programs for implementation with the three classes, respectively, were developed by the authors. First, a program with three pictorial analogies was developed. Then, a program with three animation analogies was developed by replacing the pictorial analogies with animation analogies. One analogy was for representing the roles of the elements of the simple circuits, another one was for representing the resistance as a function of the length of the wire, and the other was for representing the resistance as a function of the thickness of the wire. One of the pictorial analogies used in the pictorial analogy instruction is shown in Fig. 1. Figure 1 (a) is the analogue domain, and (b) is the target domain. The crooked tube, pump, and cock in the analogue domain correspond to the resistance, the battery, and the switch, respectively. By adding an animation of water flowing and the arrow sign showing the amount of water flow per unit time to the pictorial analogies, we made the animation analogies used in the animation analogy instruction. In non-analogy instruction, instead of teaching by analogy, students experiments with measuring the electric current were used. The structure of the programs and the teaching procedures in those three programs were the same. Fig. 2. Instructional procedures for the three programs. Procedure AAI Class PAI Class NAI Class Introduction Presenting of learning Presenting of learning Presenting of learning objectives objectives objectives Deployment Animation analogy and Pictorial analogy and Experiment small group discussion small group discussion Evaluation Formative evaluation Formative evaluation Formative evaluation and Summary Summary and closure Summary and closure Summary and closure

3 Effect of Instruction Using Animation Analogy on the Middle School Y. M. Kim and K. R. Ryu Table 1. Content of the problems. Content of the Problems 1. Direction of electric current. 2. Conservation of electric current (objective test). 3. Conservation of electric current (subjective test). 4. Electric current variation with the length of the resistor. 5. Electric current variation with the cross-sectional area of the resistor. 6. Magnitude of resistance as functions of the length and the cross-sectional areas of the resistors (not so difficult). 7. Magnitude of resistance as functions of the length and the cross-sectional areas of the resistors (difficult). 3. Implementation of the Programs The three programs, animation analogy, pictorial analogy, and non-analogy, were implemented with classes AAI, PAI, and NAI respectively. The same teacher taught all 3 classes for 2 periods of school time each. The instructional procedures for the three programs are shown in Fig. 2. All students were divided into five or six small groups. The group members of the AAI and the PAI classes studied electric current concepts using analogies and discussed the analogies, and the group members of NAI studied them by experiments measuring the electric current in the circuits instead of using analogies. As animation analogies with narration were provided on a CD- ROM to each group of the AAI class, they could watch them repeatedly during their study. 4. Pre-test and Post-test Pre-testing to investigate the students conceptions about electricity before instruction, which was developed by the authors and include 7 problems, was applied to the 3 groups before implementing the programs. Also, post-testing to investigate their achievements, which was almost the same as pre-testing, except for the 6 th and 7 th problems, even in the two problems only numerical quantities are different from the pretest problems, was applied to the 3 classes after implementing the programs. The contents of the problems are shown in Table 1. Problem 1 was to indicate the direction of the current in a simple circuit. In problem 2, students had to compare the strength of the current at 4 points of a simple circuit consisting of a resistor, a battery, and a switch. In problem 3, the students were asked to explain their answers to problem 2. They were asked in the problem 4 and 5 how the current in a circuit with a resistor changed if the resistor became longer or thicker. They were also asked in problem 6 to choose resistor with smallest resistance from among 3 resistors with different lengths and thickness and to explain their answers. Problem 7 was about calculating the resistance of one wire when the radius and the thickness were given, compared to the resistor whose radius, length, and resistance were known. IV. ANALYSIS To test if the animation analogy instruction is more effective than the pictorial analogy instruction and the non-analogy instruction for students understanding about electricity, we determined if there were statistically significant differences among the total scores and among the correct answer rates to each probem before instruction. Then, after instruction, the same variables were analyzed by using the Chi-Square test. For scoring their achievements, 1 point was given for a correct answer, and 0 points for a wrong answer to each problem. 1. Results of Pre-test When the total scores among the three groups in the pretest were compared, there was no statistically significant difference. However, when the correct answer rates to each problem among the three groups were compared, Table 2. Correct answer rates and their significance for each problem in the pre- and the post-tests Problem No. of correct answers Chi-square value significance number (N = 30) AAI PAI NAI pre post pre post pre post pre post pre post p<.05

4 -780- Journal of the Korean Physical Society, Vol. 38, No. 6, June 2001 Table 3. Statistics about pre-test results for problem 6 & 7. Points in problem 6 Points in problem (wrong) (correct) (wrong) (correct) count AAI % within group G % of total R Count O PAI % within group U % of total P Count NAI % within group % of total total Count % within group % of Total Significance Chi-Square value test df 2 2 Significance there were statistically significant differences (p.05) among the three groups only in problems 6 and 7. In those problems, the achievements of the animation analogy group and non-analogy group were lower than that of the pictorial analogy group. Table 2 shows the correct answer rates, Chi-Square values, and significance of the pre- and post-test results in each problem, and Table 3 shows the details of the statistical results of the pretest in problem numbers 6 and 7. From the Table 3, we can find that the achievements of the animation analogy class and the non-analogy with experiments class were significantly lower than the achievement of the pictorial analogy class. 2. Results of Posttest Table 2 also shows the correct answer rates and the significance of the posttest results for each problem. The statistics in the Table 2 say that there was no significant difference among the correct answer rates of the three classes for each problem. However in the pre-test as mentioned above, the achievements of the animation analogy class were significantly lower than those of the pictorial analogy class for problems 6 and 7. Table 2 also shows the number of correct answers on the pre-test and the post-test, and the increase in the number of correct answers after instruction. From Table 2, it is found that after instruction, the average correct answer rate of the AAI class had increased most among the three classes. From these results, it is inferred that animation analogy was more effective than pictorial analogy for students understanding of rather difficult concepts in electricity. V. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION Firstly, based only on the analysis of data in this study, we can t say instruction with animation analogy is more effective than the other two methods of instruction. Particularly, in the case of low-level problems about electricity, there was no statistically significant difference among the three groups in students understanding. However, in the case of rather higher level problems, the animation analogy class students understanding was significantly higher than that of the pictorial analogy class. This implies that instruction with animation analogies can be more effective than that with pictorial analogies. Secondly, the data in this study did not verify statistically that instruction with analogies was more effective than that without analogies. This result implies that instruction with animation analogies, when the analogies are not used carefully, can be less effective than instruction without analogies. As a matter of fact, research a decade ago in Korea showed that instruction with pictorial analogies was less effective than instruction without analogies [7]. As we mentioned above, the subject number sampled was too small and for only a few concepts in physics animation analogies were developed and implemented, so the results in this study may not be generalized even though there are slight differences among the three strategies. Through further in-depth studies about animation analogy instructions, we will thoroughly test whether animation analogies are more effective than any other analogies for students understanding of abstract and difficult physics concepts. While developing the animation analogies, we had difficulties in representing physical phenomena by animation, for example, water flow and speed of flowing water.

5 Effect of Instruction Using Animation Analogy on the Middle School Y. M. Kim and K. R. Ryu In our program, the speed of flowing water in the tube was represented by the movement of small black points in the water and a change in the length of arrows drawn beside the water tube. This means the ideas for and the skills in representing the analogue elements by animation may be very important for developing instructional programs with animation analogies. REFERENCES [1] R. J. Osborne, Research in Science & Technological Education 1, 73 (1983). [2] S. M. Stocklmayer and D. F. Treagust, Science and Education 3, 131 (1994). [3] Y. M. Kim and H. S. Park, Journal of the Korean Association for Research in Science Education 20, 411 (2000). [4] R. B. Thiele and D. F. Treagust, Journal of Research In Science Teaching 31, 227 (1994). [5] F. A. Smith and J. D. Wilson, The Physics Teacher 12, 396 (1974). [6] R. Duit, On The Role Of Analogies, draft paper presented at IPN (1988). [7] Y. M. Kim and S. J. Pak, Mulli Kyoyuk(Phys. Teaching) 10, 39 (1992).