Literature Review_Tinghua Yuan 3.0

Running head: EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSESSMENTS 1

What are Effective Instructions and Assessments in Hands-on Activities

in Middle School Science Teaching and Learning

Tinghua Yuan

Santa Clara University

EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSESSMENTS 2

What are Effective Instructions and Assessments in Hands-on Activities

in Middle School Science Teaching and Learning

Introduction

It’s been a while since John Dewey became one of the most famous supporters of hands-

on learning and experiential education after writing Experience and Education (1938), and

then hands-on activities have had a great impact on education ever since. In the past several

decades, hands-on activities have been widely used. However sometimes it is questionable on

whether the hands-on activities are effective. In quite a few scenarios, hands-on activities are

labeled as engaging but intellectually aimless (Wiggins & Mctighe, 2005). The activities may

be well organized around a theme and provide interdisciplinary connections. But the

instructions during the process of activities and the assessments after the activities are usually

not given as much attention to as the activities are. Instead, I believe more emphasis should

be put on the instructions and the assessments because the instructions are the ways in which

the teacher helps students to achieve learning outcomes, and the assessments are the means to

check whether students reach the expected learning goals or not. However, both the

instructions and the assessments of hands-on activities are not easy to design and apply.

The instructions to be conducted during the activity should first be carefully considered

when designing a hands-on activity. One important question is that to what extent should the

instructions be given to students? From my experience, too much teaching intervention may

constantly interrupt students’ exploration in the hands-on activities. Too detailed instructions

may prevent students from critical and independent thinking. Both too much intervention and

too detailed instructions will lead back to the teacher-centered education again; and then

hands-on activity will be formalism rather than a student-centered inquiry-based learning

process. On the contrary, without enough instructions, students may either aimlessly do the

activity or feel challenged when they meet with obstacles. Doing the activity without a


certain goal undermines students’ attitude towards hands-on activities; students may not

consider classroom activities as a useful mean of learning. Thus, to my point of view,

instructions should be carefully considered and properly given in hands-on activities.

While designing a hands-on activity, I believe assessments should be woven into the

process of the activity instead of being conducted at the end of the activity as a summative

conclusion. Actually assessing the learning outcomes of hands-on activity is not easy. I think

traditional assessments like tests and quizzes may not be valid for hands-on activities. Tests

and quizzes may work well in assessing students’ grasp of fact-based knowledge, but they

have obvious limitations in assessing hands-on activities, in which more aspects of learning

are addressed besides content facts. As the seminar study “Formative and Summative

Assessment by Teachers” mentioned, the fundamental problem in assessment practices was

that the assessment was not integrated into teaching and failed to promote students’

conceptual understanding (Black, 1993). If assessments are not embedded into the teaching

and learning process, then these end-of-unit or end-of-semester tests involving traditional

assessment and evaluation methods, such as true or false questions, matching practices,

filling in the blanks, and multiple-choice questions, encourage surface learning and rote

learning as they usually cover isolated or detailed information likely to be forgotten by

children in a short time (Butler, 1987; Butler & Neuman, 1995). Therefore, traditional

assessments are not valid in assessing students’ performance in hands-on activities

comprehensively and convincingly. I feel students’ performance during the activities should

not be ignored because it shows how students get engaged in learning and how students

revise and refine their understanding of a concept through exploring and solving problems in

the activity process. Hence, I think how to assess students’ learning outcomes in a more

reasonable and reliable way is an essential part in hands-on activities. Ideally, every teacher

should be aware of that applying hands-on activity into lessons is not simply because it’s a


fancy teaching method, but because we know it could be a good tool to facilitate and enhance

students’ learning as long as we use appropriate teaching instructions and effective learning

assessments.

I am very interested in what teaching instructions and learning assessments should be

used in hands-on activities, especially in middle schools science subjects. For two reasons,

the first one is that I was a middle school chemistry teacher, and I believe hands-on activities

are useful in science teaching and learning. However, hands-on activities don’t work well in

my classroom. I want to know what are useful instructions and effective assessments in

hands-on activities so that I will be able to successfully use them to enhance students learning.

The second reason is that there are a lot of researches and experiments on applying hands-on

activities to science learning. I have seen a lot of examples that other teachers doing hands-on

activities in their teaching; however, I find it hard to see the real effectiveness in the learning

and teaching process. Various assessments have been used in hands-on activities. But the

main problem in these assessments, as far as I see, is that most of these assessments are still

fact-based tests, which are widely used in the lecture-based learning. I think fact-based tests

are invalid in assessing the effectiveness of hands-on activities in that they only focus on the

summative learning outcomes rather than the entire learning process. I believe the

assessments for hands-on activities should include more than assessing how well students can

answer the multiple choices. In fact, there should be more evidences in how students are

engaging in the learning process; how they construct and re-construct their understanding and

knowledge building. In this review, I am trying to find what are effective instructions and

assessments being used in hands-on activities currently, and what are further steps to go.

Instructions in Hands-on Activities

While implementing hands-on activities into science learning, proper instructions should

be given to students to avoid them perceiving the essence of science as simple doing of the


activity instead of teachers’ verbalized intentions (Duschl & Gitomer, 1997).

Good instructions in hands-on activities should include but not limited to:

1. The teacher should give students enough time to explore, investigate and share

thoughts with each other during the activity; the teacher clarifies student understanding and

provides them with correct information after students discussing their thoughts in groups or

in the whole class (Jang-Long, 2014).

2. The teacher should pose questions to guide and encourage students to observe and

explore carefully instead of explaining concept directly and giving students correct answers

(Jang-Long, 2014).

In addition, when the teacher recognizes some students are doing the activities either

aimlessly or with struggles, detailed guiding rules and log sheets are encouraged to give to

students so that they can critically reflect on the activity in meaningful ways. Guiding rules

help students keep on the track and feel less frustrated when they are stuck; log sheets require

students to record their actions and predictions to reinforce the purpose of the activity and

encourage students to detect patterns in the activity (Anderson & Barnett, 2013)

Assessments in Hands-on Activities

Summative and Formative Assessment

Assessment is an important component of the entire hands-on activity. As mentioned in

the introduction, I believe it should be designed ahead of the activity and should be

embedded into the process of the activity. That is to say, in my opinion, effective assessments

in hands-on activity should not be considered as a test or quiz, which is usually called

summative assessment. However, in most studies addressed in this review, summative

assessments are largely used than formative assessment. Pre and post-test are used in almost

every study as an important method to evaluate the effectiveness of hands-on activities. They

are carefully designed and planned to be conducted in a thoughtful way. For example, in


order to reduce the possibility of students’ familiarity with the questions when they were

asked to do the post-test after finishing the activity, the pretest was given to them one week

before the activity took place (Ekmekci & Gulacar, 2015). Moreover, the test usually

included simple but precise questions like “True or False” questions and multiple choices,

which related to the science concept that students would explore in the coming hands-on

activity. Even though the results from pre and post-test are positive and prove contributions

to science learning made by hands-on activities, they fail to reveal how students learn and

how they make progresses in the activity process.

The importance of involving formative assessment into hands-on activities is obvious, it

provides the teacher with a teaching approach where assessment and teaching can be

integrated into one another (Selco, Bruno & Sue, 2013). Though formative assessment is not

as widely used as summative assessment in the studies, there are some methods can be

categorized into formative assessments. In the pretest of one of the studies, students were

provided with space beside the questions to write the reason why they chose their particular

answer (Anderson & Barnett, 2013). I feel asking students to write down the reason for their

choice is a way to get more information about how students understand and explain the

science concepts than answering the multiple choices without giving any reason.

Another way of formative assessment is student interview. About half of the studies I

read used student interview as a formative assessment in addition to pre and post-test. The

interviewees were randomly picked and asked descriptive questions, such as drawing pictures

of their ideas in the activity topic, demonstrating their understanding of the concept they

learned in the hands-on activities, etc. A number of misconceptions about the science

concepts emerged when students were asked to answer descriptive questions in the interviews.

The results from the interviews showed that even though students were able to choose the

correct answers in multiple choices in the post-test, they failed to give correct explanations


when asked why they chose the specific answer; or they couldn’t clearly and correctly

articulate the definition of the science concept just learned (Anderson & Barnett, 2013). This

conflict between the results from post-test and the results from student interview reminded

me the importance of formative assessment, because summative assessment like multiple

choices might be students’ guessing, which is not a reliable way to evaluate the learning

outcomes.

Besides assessing students either before the activity or after the activity, there are many

evidences can be collected in the process of the activity through careful observation.

Compared with traditional teacher-centered learning, the hands-on activities give students

more opportunities to carefully and precisely observe the resulting phenomena and then

distinguish the differences between their original ideas and the phenomena they observed

when they are exploring the activity (Jang Long, 2014). That is to say students performances

during the activity are valuable evidences that can be considered as sources for formative

assessment. There are two ways to collect students performances during the activities

addressed in the studies I read, one is videotaping, and the other is researcher’s observation.

When videotaping is used, the cameras are put in particular positions so that each of them

focused on different targets. For example, in one study, one camera was focused on the

teacher to track the teacher’s movements and comments. Another camera was a ‘‘roving’’

camera moving around the room to capture “interesting” classroom moments. The other three

cameras were focused on a specific group of students who were playing Supercharged! (the

name of a videogame used as a hand-on activity in this study) (Anderson & Barnett, 2013).

The advantage of videotaping the entire process of activity is that it enables both researchers

and the teacher to closely watch the process of the activity as many times as possible so that

they are able to collect many evidences to assess students formatively. Nevertheless, the

weakness of videotaping is also quite obvious. It is very time consuming. Researchers and the


teacher have to spend more than twice the time of the activity to watch and collect

information from the videos. Researcher’s observation usually means that researchers record

their observations concerning students discussion, interaction with each other, and students’

frustrations and successes during the activity. Researchers’ observation sometimes can be a

substitute for videotaping, and it can be a supplement for videotaping as well.

In addition, student journals are also used as a formative assessment in the studies I read.

Student journal is a powerful tool for reflection, so student journal can be a useful formative

assessment tool (Friedrichsen, 2001). I think asking students to write journal in the process of

science concepts learning is actually forcing students to reflect their thoughts in a timely

manner so that it enables them to capture each important progress they make while they are

constructing and revising their thoughts.

Teachers’ and Students’ Attitude towards Hands-on Activities

The Students’ Attitude Towards Hands-on Activity

Overall hands-on activities have positive impacts on students’ attitude towards science

learning and are greatly welcomed by students. Students underwent substantial positive

changes in their confidence in themselves as science learners, their beliefs in the utility of

science, and their liking of science (Friedrichsen, 2001). For instance, as one of the studies

mentioned students were eager to explore and perform the activities to demonstrate the

phenomena themselves or in groups after they observed and were amazed by the phenomena

done by the Science Magic-based learning activities (Jang Long, 2014). This study includes a

Quasi-experimental design. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis were addressed in this

study. Two eighth-grade classes at a central Taiwanese junior high school involved and

divided into an experimental and a comparison group. There are 37 students in the

experimental group (19 boys and 18 girls), 31 students in the comparison group (15 boys and

16 girls). Data of this study include pre and post-test about science attitude, student survey at


the end of the activity, individual interviews and class videos. In this study, the Science

Magic-based learning activities largely arouse students’ learning motivation. I believe the

motivation is the biggest power for people to move forward and finally achieve their goals.

Hands-on activities like the Science Magic are especially important for students who are not

doing well in science, in that they can stimulate their interest in science learning. Besides,

after playing with the Science Magic, students shared their thoughts in the interview that they

felt learning through such activities was more concrete, and it made them feel easier to

perceive these concepts. Additionally, according to the post-test and individual interview,

students in the Science Magic activity became more interested in checking the underlying

principles and variables of activities, and built a more positive attitude toward science

learning after independently deciphering the tricks they met in the activity (Jang Long, 2014).

However, hands-on activities, especially video games don’t work for all students. In a

mixed methodological study which involved 91 8th grade students in five separate classes

over seven class periods. A prior exam was given to students to get quantitative data and

random student interview together with videotaping provided researchers with qualitative

data. The results of the data showed that quite a few students expressed their different

opinions in the student interview. Some students suggested that they were discomfort with

the video game because of the fact that they did not perceive that a video game could really

be educational. Additionally many students in the experimental group were somewhat

confused by the Supercharged! activity and sought more specific guidance about how to

navigate the learning experience. They complained that they didn’t get the point of the

activity and they doubted how they would learn physics through the game (Anderson &

Barnett, 2013).

Besides, the class setting and the students’ previous learning experience also play a very

important role in determining students’ attitude towards hands-on activities. Usually hands-


on activities require more group discussions than traditional lecturing based lessons. Students

who are used to lecturing lessons may not be very comfortable to do hands-on activities.

Some students were reluctant to engage in discussions, and one of them commented that they

were just not really used to talking in class. For these students, learning science through

exploratory activities was uncommon, not only because students had little reference (or no

script) for how to participate in non-teacher led or teacher centric science activities, but also

they felt uncomfortable to talk in class (Anderson & Barnett, 2013).

A quantitative study on student’s confidence in hands-on activities showed that girls

were less confident than boys about their performance in areas that are stereotypically

considered as male-type tasks (Kahle & Meece, 1994) and in situations giving ambiguous

feedback (Lenney, 1977). In this study, 56 seventh and eighth graders (20 girls and 36 boys)

from two private middle schools in an urban area of southwestern Pennsylvania were

involved. Data came from knowledge assessment questionnaire before and after the activity.

Seven questions were identical multiple choices, and after each question, students were asked

to indicate their confidence in the answers on a five-point scale (Klahr, Triona & Williams,

2007).

The Teacher’s Attitude towards Hands-on Activity

The teacher’s attitude towards hands-on activities plays a large role in whether and how

hands-on activities are implemented in science learning. For example, as what Peterson

believed, if the teacher’s implicit theory about learners or his/her mental image of effective

teaching were contrary to that embodied in a new curriculum or an experimental teaching

method, e.g. hands-on activities, s/he would be unlikely to bring the innovation alive with

great enthusiasm, thoroughness, and persistence. Alternatively, if an innovation or

experimental treatment were introduced after a teacher’s yearly and term planning were

complete, it would be unlikely that the innovation would be integrated into the classroom


activity flow as thoroughly as the researcher would hope. That is to say, the earlier a teacher

realizes the need and urgency of implementing hands-on activities into teaching, no matter

science teaching or other subjects, the more willingly s/he will accept and apply the activities

into his/her classroom and the better learning outcomes students will achieve through the

hands-on activity. In addition, Peterson also believed that the maturing professional teacher

has developed a style of planning for instruction. In this style of planning, several interrelated

types of planning were included and that has become automatic with experience. Because of

much of his/her interactive teaching consists of routines familiar to the students, s/he doesn’t

need much time to collect and process information. These teachers reflect on and analyze

their own teaching and apply the result of these reflections to their future plans and actions.

In short, they have become researchers of their own teaching effectiveness. This sense of

self-reflection should be developed as early as possible, probably during the undergraduate

teacher education (or earlier) and it will continue to grow and change with professional

experience. Peterson’s theory provides me with a clear picture showing how a teacher should

correctly build a positive attitude towards new teaching methods, like hands-on activities, and

how a teacher could grow and become a mature and professional teacher by constantly doing

self-reflection.

However, in the studies addressed in this review, the teacher’s attitude towards hands-on

activity is a little bit ambivalent. In one study, many teachers reported that implementing

hands-on activities into their modules was engaging for their students, and they also noted

that a number of students who generally showed no interest in science were actively

participating in science lesson that was embedded with hands-on activities. When asked if

they would continue to use hands-on activities in teaching, most of them responded positively.

Additionally, even though the teachers noted that while the development of hands-on

activities was very time-consuming, all believed that this effort was well worth their time due


to student engagement and performance (Cantrell, Pekcan & Itani, 2006).

On the other hand, different opinions were expressed by teachers who were developing

and applying an online simulation as an hands-on activity in another study. In this study,

most of the teachers stated that their personal science content knowledge seemly strengthened

by their participation in the development of the online simulations, and they all agreed that

they were excited about the idea of online simulations, however they were somewhat less

enthusiastic about having all their students participate individually in the simulations.

According to the study, most schools in the study lacked easy access to computer labs for

individual student use and none of the eight teachers who were involved in the study had

more than four computers in their own classrooms. The equipment shortage was the biggest

barrier for these teachers to firmly and successfully apply the useful and engaging activity

into their daily teaching, although all of the teachers believed that the simulation made a

positive contribution to the learning activity. Currently with limited computers, these teachers

could only use the simulation in a large group setting and project the simulation on a large

screen in front of the class so that all students could collect data together (Pekcan & Itani,

2006).

If given enough time and equipment, I believe the majority of science teachers are

willing to apply hands-on activities into teaching.

Limitations in Current Research

All of the studies addressed in this review were well designed and conducted in a

rigorous and logical way. However, there are four points of limitations in these researches

and I believe could be generalized to a broader scope, not limited to studies mentioned in this

review.

1. None of the studies mentioned “an inclusive environment” except one article that is

about students with disabilities. However, it can be generalized that a safe environment helps


all students perform better in hands-on activities. An inclusive environment is important in

inquiry-based learning and hands-on activities (Mumba, 2015). As educators, we have the

responsibility to provide students with a safe place, in which they are free to make attempts

and mistakes, and failures should be allowed.

2. According to the results from interviews and post-tests in the study that focused on a

video game called “Supercharged!”, evidences revealed that students did not infer some of

the more complex concepts depicted in the game (Anderson & Barnett, 2013). More guides

should be provided to students, especially those who doubt learning can be achieved by

games to understand the complex concepts that could not be understood by themselves.

3. More meta-cognitive activities should be more provided to student during the hands-

on learning process. Meta-cognitive activities such as reflective opportunities will provide

scaffolds for students and to reinforce that they are engaged in an educational learning

experience (Anderson & Barnett, 2013).

4. More formative assessments should be given to evaluate the effectiveness of hands-on

activities. Because it is what I believe that summative assessment fails to reveal the process

of the hands-on activity, which is the essence of the activity. Students could give correct

answers in a post-test composed with multiple choices by memorizing the phenomena that

they observe in the activity but they may not be able to explain the reason. While collecting

evidences in the activity process helps to assess students formatively and validly.

Conclusion

Instructions are important and essential in hands-on activities. Teachers should give

close attention to students so that guides and instructions can be given to students in time.

Teachers should be notified that when students are still confused with the activity even

though they have played with it for a while, additional instructions should be given to them

so that they won’t feel frustrated in all hands-on activities that might be applied in the future.


Most hands-on activities are assessed in a summative way, which fails to reveal the

student’s performance in the process of the activity. According to the studies mentioned,

open-ended questions, student interview, videotaping, researcher’s observation and student’s

journals are all effective and practical formative assessment, which I believe evaluates the

effectiveness of hands-on activities more holistically and validly.

The majority of both students and teachers hold positive attitudes towards hands-on

activities in science learning. Teachers are pleased with more students showing interest in

science, especially students who are not well-performed in science before. Students also feel

science learning more attractive and interesting when hands-on activities are introduced into

class. However, there are two barriers for teachers to implement hands-on activity in a long

term after the end of the studies. One is that they don’t have much extra time to spend on

hands-on activity design, and the second is sometimes there is not enough equipment for the

activities.

To sum up, hands-on activities are effective teaching and learning method as long as

proper instructions, assessments and enough time and equipment are given, and I think it is

actually the cooperation of all parts of the education system.

Implication

The teacher’s attitude towards hands-on activities plays a large role in whether and how

hands-on activities are implemented in science learning. The earlier a teacher realizes the

need and urgency of implementing hands-on activities into teaching, no matter science

teaching or other subjects, the more willingly s/he will accept and apply the activities into

his/her classroom and the better learning outcomes students will achieve through the hands-

on activity.

Sometimes hands-on activity is not a must in middle school science learning. Whether

or not to apply hands-on activities into science learning depends on if the teacher wants to


improve students’ design skills, because hands-on activities develop students design ability

better than other forms of learning (Ekmekci & Gulacar, 2015).

It is important to help students to know that activities, games and playing are also

effective ways of learning. Learning doesn’t have to be serious lecturing and note taking,

especially when the game became a disruption to their traditional ways of science learning

and interfered with how they perceived the learning experience. When it was clear that the

experimental group who plays games outperformed the control group on most measures, the

key becomes helping students recognize the power of games as a learning tool (Anderson &

Barnett, 2013).


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Literature Review_Tinghua Yuan 3.0

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