The Use of DragGame E-Learning Activities to Enhance Curricular Decision-making

Abstract

<p>This paper reports the outcomes of a project conducted in junior secondary science classrooms in Hong Kong, which used an innovative tool called DragGame (DG e-acts) to enhance teachers’ curricular decision-making. Such digital tools allowed students to construct representations of their sub-microscopic understanding of matters and processes by dragging and dropping the provided digital objects, e.g., symbols representing different types of particles or arrows indicating the directions of forces. Ten science teachers from eight local secondary schools participated in the project either as implementers or co-developers of learning activities of the junior science topics, including “condensation and evaporation”, “thermal contraction and expansion”, “photosynthesis”, “digestion”, “acids and alkalis”, and “force and motion”. Classroom observations, teacher post-implementation reflections, and student interviews were employed to collect data for analyzing the teachers’ practice of the use of the DG e-acts tools. Teacher participants were found to be more capable of identifying curriculum incoherence (e.g., the particulate view of particles introduced in Secondary 1 was not reinforced in Secondary 2) due to the co-designing and implementation processes. Moreover, teachers were found to be more capable of using students’ ideas elicited in productive classroom dialogues to make on-the-spot curricular decisions. Based on our findings, we postulate that one-on-one teacher development programs regarding the use of digital tools in classrooms could support the professional development of science teachers in curricular decision-making. However, the possible transfer of the new understanding to inform curricular decision-making in other scenarios was yet to be explored.</p>