C HANGING ROLES OF TEACHING MATERIALS

The teacher relied on materials as a tool that would help with the implementation of projects. The materials used in this project were all taken from an online teachers’ resource marketplace, some were just investigation forms and some were exercises that helped students learn new information about the topic. The materials that initially had the purpose of being a tool that helps students with self-guided work became the goal of the project and this, in turn, shifted the focus of learning from exploring the activities to having to fill out the forms.

Eventually, the material was seen as the means that would inform the teacher about student progress. The three pieces of data presented below depict how the role of materials changed throughout the project.

As mentioned in section 6.1, in the pre-interview, the teacher considered

‘students owning their process of learning’ and ‘students engaging in self-guided work’ as important features of project work. To achieve this, the teacher planned on using good guiding questions and materials that would assist students in self-guided work. Therefore, materials were seen as a tool that would help the students with self-guided work. This can be seen in the below excerpt from the pre-interview.

I have to plan a lot and do a lot of extra to prepare them for the self-guided work. I can’t be with them all the time, that’s why I need lots of guiding questions and material.

TABLE 13 shows the CIs from week 6 of the project. During this week students were taken to the computer lab to construct parallel and series circuits on the Circuit construction kit DC (CCDC) application. The CIs represent the role of teaching materials during the project.

TABLE 13 Electricity Project, Week 6

CI Description Events

Students start by constructing normal circuits.

Then the students experiment with all the tools that were available in the application and started to use them.

The teacher redirects the students to focus on constructing the parallel and series circuits as instructed in the booklet. students were still trying to figure out how and what to do

CI 25 Students filled

booklets are collected Teacher checks if students have filled the booklet and collects the booklets from students before they leave the class

CI 26 Students copy answers from each other

the students who forgot to fill in the table during the activity started to copy findings from their friends and finally submitted the booklet.

As one can notice, the emphasis placed on having students fill in their booklets in CI 25 led the students to copy the answers from their friends in CI 26.

Therefore, filling out the booklet became the goal of the activity during the projects. Another point to notice is that the students found it difficult to follow the instructions provided in the booklet, this was also recognized by the teacher during the project as well as in the post-interview.

In the interview 2 when the teacher was asked, ‘If you were to do the project again, how would you approach it?’ it can be seen that in addition to wanting to do shorter projects, the teacher talks about controlling the students’ worksheet by having more check-ups. The teacher thought that the conclusions made by the students were in different directions. Therefore, she says, if she had checked their materials more during the project, she could have guided the students in the right direction. At this point, worksheets/materials are seen as a tool that would inform the teacher about the students’ learning progress.

I would may be control more of their worksheets for example, I would check up, check what kind of results they have got. I don’t know maybe I would do shorter process overall, because I have not had resources to look up all the material they produce all the time. I am now as I can see some of the conclusions were totally going into different directions, may be that time I could have guided more to those people.

FIGURE 16 Role of materials

This finding also highlights issues related to materials and these issues are crucial to be considered. First, the teacher needs to find materials for each project by herself. This process is not only time consuming, but it is also hard to find materials that are appropriate for the specific goals of each class. An even more important issue that needs to be addressed is that internet sources for materials may not always be reliable or of good quality and this severely affects the quality of student learning through PBSL.

In conclusion, through this finding, it was seen that the role of teaching materials transformed throughout the project as shown in FIGURE 16. This brings an interesting perspective on the use of materials in projects. Teachers need to be cautious about the kind of role materials take when learning science through projects and decide how dependent should students be on the teaching materials when performing scientific investigations. This finding also opens up a space to ask questions such as ‘what is the purpose of using materials in PBSL’

and ‘How can materials be used so that it supports student learning efficiently?’

•Materials as a tool

During

After