Can the interactive whiteboard support young children’s collaborative communication and thinking in classroom science activities?

Abstract

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have been widely introduced to English primary schools (5-11 years) in the last decade and this has generated much research interest. In the past, research has focused on IWB-use in teacher-led sessions, attending particularly to the nature of teacher-pupil interaction at the IWB and the apparent motivational advantages for children. In contrast, this study focuses on children's communication and thinking during their semi-autonomous use of the IWB during collaborative groupwork in primary school science lessons, aiming in part to see if the IWB is suited to this type of use. Over the course of one school year, twelve primary teachers of Years 4 and 5 (8-10 years) took part in a professional development and research programme which involved them in devising a sequence of three science lessons incorporating small-group activity at the IWB. The functionality of the IWB is analysed here as means for supporting the children's joint communication and thinking, using embedded cues and the availability of certain features in the IWB technology. Our observational analysis of two examples of children's collaborative activity in different classrooms, together with subsequent group interviews, suggests that the IWB can make some identifiable contributions to children's productive communication and thinking. However the IWB is not seen to be an entirely distinctive or pedagogically transformative learning resource in the primary classroom. In our developing conceptual framework, the children's knowledge building is closely related to their active engagement in using IWB affordances and their productive dialogue, essentially supported by the teacher's scaffolding strategies, the establishment and use of "talk rules" in conversation, and the opportunities and constraints applying in classroom participation structures. These conditions help the children to deal with interconnected social, cognitive, and technical problems arising over time. Certain aspects of this form of computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) are discussed. These relate to the integration of the

A New Way of Using the Interactive Whiteboard in a High School Physics Classroom: A Case Study

“…Though findings from research on the implementation and use of IWBs suggest guidelines for the introduction of the technology into schools and teacher training (see Slay et al 2008, for example), as well as classroom use in different subjects, including science (Blanton 2008;Condie and Munro 2007;Hennessy and London 2013;Kennewell and Morgan 2003;Kershner et al 2010;Koenraad 2008;Mercer et al 2010;Moss et al 2007;Murcia and Sheffield 2010;Murcia 2014;Smith et al 2005;Sweeney 2013;Winzenried et al 2010), concrete examples of subject-specific instructional materials, studies of their implementations and concrete suggestions on how to design or implement specific instructional materials in the future are few and far between, particularly in physics.…”

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Teacher support in computer-supported lab work: bridging the gap between lab experiments and students’ conceptual understanding

“…Digital representations visualizing scientific concepts can also be productive resources in teacher-led classroom discussion, as Gillen and colleagues demonstrated in their study of interactive and multimodal whiteboards used in primary science education (Gillen et al 2008;Kershner et al 2010). In the current study, the teacher used a digital representation of the DNA profiles produced by the students during the lab experiment as a resource when recapping the lab experiment.…”

Theories of cognition in CSCW

“…The notion of dialogue partners coming from different perspectives and negotiating from these is an important contribution of dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999). Another key concept is that of a shared dynamic dialogic space, within which knowledge building can take place (Kershner et al, 2010). This is similar to the joint problem space of (Teasley & Roschelle, 1993), but now developed in an unambiguously post-cognitive manner.…”