Home PublicationsJRTEPast IssuesVolume 28 Number 5

Edited by Diane McGrath

Volume 28 Number 5 Summer 1996

Multimedia Science Projects: Seven Case Studies, Observations & Discussion

Kansas State University

Observations

In the linked sections (Teachers & Classes and Projects & Audience) we describe teachers and classes (equipment, students, community, the subject-matter of student projects, and audience), and we show samples from the project stacks from each site. The schools are abbreviated HS, MS, and ES for high, middle, and elementary school. Teachers are abbreviated T1-T10, where T1-T3 are high school teachers, T4-T8 are middle school, and T9-T10 are elementary. T1-T5 were in Group I, and T6-T10 were in Group II.

Problems and Frustrations
Not surprisingly, there was a long list of frustrations that occurred because most of the teachers and students were new to HyperCard (1987-1994), and were trying to do a project while they were also learning HyperCard, scanning, and QuickTime (1989-1994). Students for the most part did not complain, but one can see some of the frustrating times on videotape. In HS-2 the students submitted end-of-project reports in which their teacher asked one question about problems they encountered. The list of items named by one or more students included nearly everything technical that could be named (movies, sounds, links, color, beveled buttons, fonts, scanning, digitizing video, sound, etc.).

Again, because they were new to this kind of work for the most part, teachers and students encountered other problems typical of novices, such as saving an old file over a new one, working off a floppy instead of the hard drive, and not taking care of their floppies and losing their data. Equipment problems particularly nagged the elementary school. During the first semester elementary students had to make appointments to use the computer lab at the high school and walk there. This often was not a good solution because high school students were already there working. During second semester, they borrowed two computers, and one of the hard drives crashed. One school's scanner died, and another school's tutorial tapes didn't work. Some didn't have access to a scanner at all.

Two groups, teachers felt, took too long on the project (MS-1 took eight weeks, and MS-3 took an entire school year). In the first case, the computer teacher did not want to spend that much of her time on only one software package; in the second case, teachers felt they had to get their students enthused all over again in the spring. Students in another group felt they had too little time (HS-2 had less than 8 weeks), partly because students had to teach themselves HyperCard (1987-1994) and that took some time.

There were VideoSpigot problems at several schools, such as ordering the wrong version, switching to an AV machine midstream and having to learn new software, and never getting the Spigot to work at all. Pictures and movies were usually too big for floppy disks, and most schools did not have any way of getting data from one computer to another except by floppy. Research staff occasionally loaned out a portable drive.

Rural students have the opportunity to do a wide variety of things because there are so few students available for the various activities. Students have a good chance of being, for example, on the school paper and on the baseball and track teams. Teachers coach drama and football and teach math, science, and English. Everyone is very busy. The downside of this phenomenon is that it is very difficult to hold a class in which all students are present, particularly in the spring. For cooperative learning projects, the drawbacks are obvious. Students can't consult with each other; those that are left get stuck trying to figure things out by themselves and doing other people's work. The two rural high school teachers, in particular, complained that this kind of a project should not be done during track season. T1 minimized this problem by having her students communicate by notebook about what each had done and what needed to be done.

Teachers in rural areas are also isolated from each other, with typically only one science teacher per school; therefore networks of support become very important. E-mail worked for a couple of the teachers, and that helped. The research staff were very responsive to phone calls, and they got a great many of them. There was a great deal of on-site problem solving involving both teacher and students, all of whom were trying together to learn something new.

Science Understanding and Attitude
Teachers individually decided on their own grading criteria for this project, and there was no independent formal assessment of either knowledge of or attitudes toward science, the main subject of these projects. In no case was this project the only science learning going on during the year; the project was one of many learning settings and opportunities provided at all sites. The data that form the basis for the findings reported in this article are student, teacher, and research staff observations, reports, and reflections. Links are to data selected to best illustrate each section below for all age levels.

MS Teacher Explaining What Students Learned
[QT movie: 2.5MB]

Attitude toward the content of multimedia science projects.
High school projects were all interdisciplinary, and students showed a good deal of interest in the intermingling of the science and history connected with their local study sites and in plants and animals. Elementary school children focused on specific animals and habitat, and why people need to be concerned about animal habitats. Their journals reflected a real enthusiasm about the science they were learning. Students of all ages appeared to really like the field trips that were basic to every project.

Attitude toward multimedia projects.
Every group except MS-2 (see Old Hat section, below) showed a great deal of for using multimedia to do science projects. Reasons given included: "getting to know so much about one place"; learning "so much more"; "not so boring as books," questions, tests, and lectures; "it doesn't seem like science"; "it was hands on"; "it's fun"; and "you don't have to do reports."

Change in attitudes toward science.
Students' attitudes toward science did not appear to be influenced by this project. Although they enjoyed this project a lot, they did not claim that it increased the likelihood that they would continue to study science. When asked if this project influenced their liking of science, they typically responded with silence or mumbling. One exception was a group of three students from HS-1, who liked studying the land right outside their school. Two things did appear to make a difference in student attitude toward science: the teacher and the field trips.

Teacher and student reflections on learning and understanding.
Students at the high school and elementary levels felt they had learned a lot from this project, and they could tell you what they learned. Students at the middle school level seemed to have more trouble either remembering their field trips or making connections among the various parts of the project (research, multimedia, and field trips). The project had its ups and downs, lasting as long as it did. Teachers at all levels at varying points in the project expressed both frustration (with students' level or work or understanding) and pride (in students' creativity, interest, and hard work).

Teacher observations of skills that are necessary for this kind of project.
Both during and after the project, teachers commented in journals and interviews about the kinds of skills they thought students needed for a project like this, and they often expressed surprise that students didn't already have these skills. Skills mentioned were: interviewing, taking notes, finding information, writing, and organizing. Two high school teachers were interviewed at length about their thoughts on student skills; they gave us the most complete picture of the skills students needed to learn for such a project. One high school teacher described the aesthetics or design skills that need to be developed.

Teacher observations about changes in the quality of student work.
High school and middle school teachers and students reported that students learned many other things besides science in this project, and some of their comments suggest the broader learning that took place. Teachers felt that students had begun to learn something about writing, organizing, interviewing, finding information, and even how to deal with dead ends in their research. High school students reported learning such things as "compromising with a work partner," "the value of dedication and hard work," "the challenge of figuring out things" on one's own, "how to create an interesting report," "research and application skills not only for this project, but for future 'optional' critical thinking projects," and dependability.

 ES-1 Boys' Opinion on Girls and Computers
[QT movie, 2.2 MB]

Gender
In all projects, students worked in groups of two to six, all of whom were usually the same gender. For the most part students chose their own work partners, except in MS-2 and MS-3, where they chose the subject-matter they would work on, thereby determining their partners. Each group was responsible either for its own project, or a piece of a whole-class project, so all students participated to some extent in all activities, including research, writing, and constructing the multimedia; a notable exception is MS-2, where studentsdivided themselves into three separate groups--computer, art, and research--and never collaborated to put it all together. Three categories of analysis on gender-related issues were examined in this study.

Attitude toward technology-related aspects of project.
For the most part, both female and male students spent similar amounts of time doing technology-related activities. Students of both sexes indicated that they enjoyed these tasks: color, beveled buttons, screen transitions, sound, graphics, scanning, videotaping, digitizing video, entering text, working on layout, linking, and entering and editing text. It is apparent from observation, student journals and interviews, and teacher journals and interviews that girls and boys liked these activities equally well. Groups of youngsters, both girls and boys, occasionally reported confusion or boredom, but neither feeling seemed to last. For the most part, both girls and boys had a high degree of involvement and investment in all aspects of the project. In the one elementary school, the girls appeared to be dominant.

Attitude toward subject matter.
All projects dealt with science, but the first year's projects also involved the history associated with the local wildlife area they were studying. Girls and boys alike expressed or demonstrated an interest in the science and history and the processes involved in learning both (including not only data-gathering, but also note-taking, interviewing, etc.). In Group I and Group II students, both boys and girls were particularly excited by the field trips, and students of both sexes enjoyed the science and learning involved. Because we were unable to detect any change in preference for science as a result of this project, we did not pursue the question of gender differences in attitude change.

Leadership and expertise.
In no case could we find an exception to the statement that both leadership and expertise were equally distributed among the girls and the boys in any of the seven sites. This does not mean that everyone liked and excelled at everything; indeed, there were some notable dislikes and some stereotypical preferences as well. For example, one group of fourth-grade girls never seemed to enjoy themselves because they spent much of their time arguing over who would get to type, and some girls spent a good deal of time investigating color and drawing. But there were nonstereotypical interests as well--girls liking sound, boys being good at creativity in artwork, girls knowing how to put movies in a stack, boys being good at writing, and so on. The possibilities offered by group projects in multimedia meant that there were a great many roles to be filled, and learners of all types stepped in to fill them.

Taking Responsibility for Learning Length of time for the project.
The length of time that students worked on the multimedia science projects varied from site to site and among different age groups. High school projects took 8-10 weeks, and middle school projects took 2-6 months. The elementary school project took about 8 months. Teacher and student journals and interviews and the three sets of video observations tell the story of the changes that took place.

Changes.
Students began the project with enthusiasm but were unaccustomed to the kind of thinking, planning, organizing, and independent work that the project required. In the Visit 1 videotapes we often see students acting puzzled, and getting students to participate in brainstorming discussions was like pulling teeth. Yet some students were already trying to figure things out among themselves. During Visit 2 we began to see a change from puzzlement to active attempts at inquiry, locating information, collaboration, and problem solving. At the high school level, this change from passive to active, from a sense of being lost to a sense of purpose, appears to begin by about the third week, but is not sufficient to completely finish and polish the final product without a lot of effort from the teacher to prod and guide them.It is more difficult to tell about the change process for the other grade levels because the classrooms and times allotted were so widely different and because the visits were spread out over a greater time.

Responsibility to the group.
Typical scenes in every classroom (except MS-1 and MS-2, in which students worked only within their groups) involved collaboration and problem solving in every imaginable permutation--a project team working together; one team (or member) helping or consulting with another team; or problem solving among teachers, students, research staff, and sometimes with other teachers or students from the school. All people involved persisted in the face of many technological frustrations. There are many indications that students felt responsible to their group or class for their part of the project, and sometimes even stepped in to help out with parts of the project that had been assigned to other students.

Sustaining hard work.
Students from all of the high schools came in for many extra hours during and after school, on evenings, on Saturdays, and during the summer, whether to do their own part or help others; to work on the natural area to mow, plant, or water the plantings; or to simply go looking for snakes. One boy carried his camcorder with him while he worked in his family's fields so that he'd be ready if he saw any interesting animal life to put in the project. Students from MS-3 were all volunteers; theirs was not a graded project.

Personal investment in the final product.
Reports from teachers and students alike indicated a personal investment in what the final product looked like, particularly as the time approached for a public showing to an audience about whom they cared. At the end of the projects, teachers and students seemed to be pleased with their work and relieved that they had successfully completed this enormous project.

Additional Observations
Two additional findings stood out in the observations, interviews, and journals. The first was the striking relationship of self esteem to audience. The second was a surprise, and suggests what we might expect from students who have used multimedia for years.

Self-esteem and audience .
One time-saving middle school tactic was apparently a means of getting two different classes involved in working together before they began their project. MS-3 teachers had the sixth graders, who had been using HyperCard (1987-1994) for a while, teach the eighth graders who would be part of the same project but had not yet learned HyperCard. This turned out to have a remarkable effect on the self-esteem of the younger students, as commented on by teachers and noted by nearly every sixth grader in a journal entry.

Other instances of increase in self-esteem in this project were reported by several teachers. In some cases the person had some skill that others could learn from. In other cases it was related to the pride everyone experienced from showing their presentations at the end of the year.

Although teachers tried to fulfill the requirement of an audience experience somewhere in the project, it appears that this was in some cases perfunctory. That is, although they cooperated, not all teachers felt that an audience was as important as the researcher did. They did not, for example, tell students ahead of time that there would be an audience and who it would be. As projects were being polished up for whatever audience there would be, students began at the end to be concerned about the quality of the multimedia project, in part because teachers themselves began to feel pressured. For example, second year teachers all showed their students' projects at a conference for science teachers in late April; therefore teachers were particularly anxious that things be in shape for their own (authentic) performances.

Old hat.
The experience of MS-2 in which doing multimedia was "old hat" to the students, gave us the impression that most of them were not at all interested in it, except for those few (3 out of 24) who happened to prefer working on computers. The teacher was very excited about using multimedia on this project, but students were really quite uninterested. They had done this kind of thing since the third grade.

Discussion and Conclusions

In this study we set out to look for clues about the process of constructing multimedia science projects. We examined student attitudes, the kinds of things students learned, the ways in which the oft-cited "taking responsibility for one's own learning" manifested itself, and whether girls and boys both took leadership roles or developed expertise in these projects. What we found confirms most, but not all, of our hunches and suggests hypotheses and questions for future research.

Teachers and students believed that a lot of learning took place not only about science and computers, but also (in high school projects) about the many issues associated with studying a place in one's own community, e.g. history, tradition, laws, and resources available for such research (museums, newspapers, etc.). And we began to see the impact these projects made, particularly on the older students, who reported learning to hold up their ends of a group effort, the importance of not waiting until the last minute, the satisfaction that comes from designing something or figuring out something yourself, and the self-esteem found in teaching someone else what you know. Students of all ages tremendously enjoyed this way of learning and worked very hard at it, confirming the Blumenfeld et al. (1991) claim of multimedia's high motivational value. However, student appreciation for science itself was not observed to change as a result of this project, disconfirming the notion that the project's connection to the local community would increase students' connection to the field of science. It appears that for high school students, however, ttheir notions of what constitutes "science" was broadened and they found this interdisciplinary work appealing.

Teachers found that students were surprisingly unprepared to do the kind of research and organizing tasks needed for such a project (see Carver et al., 1992), but noted that these skills did improve as students found a need for and used them. This observation supports a design view of learning because it begins to spell out the processes that are involved in real intellectual work and the learning that takes place during even a first attempt at such a project. One teacher (T1) had given a lot of thought to those aspects of the technology (e.g., fonts, color, etc.) that assisted in representing the subject in multimedia format. The excellence of her students' project lends support to Lehrer et al. (1994), who suggest that such artifacts can be used to help learners think about how to represent an idea. Two of the teachers collaborated on a project at three of the sites, but no teachers collaborated with teachers of art, English, or any other subject in which expression in a new medium could be an explicit subject for students to examine more deeply.

We chose to examine gender as a factor in attitude and expertise for two reasons: (a) our earlier informal observations had suggested that multimedia would motivate both girls and boys, and (b) Oakes & RAND (1990) had proposed that science and technology would be more appealing to girls if taught in a way that involves activities and connects learners to people and community. Indeed we found boys and girls equally enthusiastic, equally committed to the project, equally able to demonstrate expertise and leadership, and equally excited about the multimedia aspects of the project. Girls also seemed to like science as much as the boys. However, there was no indication that girls or boys were more likely to continue in science because of these community-based multimedia projects.

Our data lend a great deal of support to the popular claim that multimedia project design increases student responsibility for their own learning. This was seen in the many hours high school students put in outside of their regular school day, the voluntary nature of one middle school project, student persistence after much frustration, sustained work over a long period of time, reports of helping and teaching each other and stepping in to do the work of absent colleagues, concern for how this project would appear to an audience, and reports of feeling that they had to be reliable because others were depending on them. This change in learners was bumpy, with some doing it and some not, some doing it today but not tomorrow, some doing some responsible things but not others, and with great teacher frustration at times. But as the end drew near, students rose to the challenge, and were universally and deservedly proud of their finished products.

The presentation to a valued audience turned out to be a very important factor in this process of change from traditional to responsible learner. We might well take a lesson from this observation. Student self-esteem, pride, and visible rewards from amazed audiences were seen when the audience was a peer group or parents. These qualities, from the researchers' own informal impressions, were not observed when the audience was simply the teacher, classmates who were also involved in the project, or the researcher.

Finally, one middle school classroom was unique in a number of respects, one of which was the fact that they had used multimedia for years and were not very interested in using it during this project. They enjoyed the science and the field trips, but very few chose to work on the multimedia part of the project. It may be that when multimedia projects become commonplace, they will lose their holding power. That is, it is conceivable that design is not, in fact, the critical issue in these projects, but rather that novelty is the important factor. This is a disturbing possibility, and one we are not enthusiastic about proposing. But the question requires further inquiry, because too many resources are being invested in this direction if we are simply seeing the effects of novelty. There is, however, a likely alternative explanation: the make-up of this particular group of students. These were students who hadn't been successful in science the previous semester, and the hands-on field science course based deeply on field trips was designed specifically for them. This very concrete learning experience was quite appealing to these students, and they either may not have been ready for the design experience or may have found it distracting from other activities that were important to them.

This readiness-for-design hypothesis suggests that we should reexamine some of our data from the point of view of age, as well. Age had not been a targeted research question, nor had it even been a part of the original grant proposal, which was aimed at the secondary level. But we may nevertheless reflect on what we saw. Students at all ages were enthusiastic, involved, and learned the appropriate amount of science and technology for the project. But the sense of responsibility was absent at the elementary level, very mixed (really only seen at MS-3) at the middle school level, and very impressive at the high school level. It seems likely that the design project has elements that can best be developed at the secondary level. This is an important hypothesis to examine, because it is usually the younger students who have the opportunities that a self-contained classroom presents to work with multimedia: time, space, and less emphasis on narrow subject matter.

We offer some tentative recommendations to teachers who are interested in having their students design multimedia projects. You should be encouraged by the enthusiasm and positive attitude shown by girls and boys at all ages (at least if this is a new idea to them). Be aware that students do not come with ready-made design skills, and be prepared to think about these issues aloud with your students. We are confident that these skills won't simply happen. Just as with problem-solving skills (Salomon & Perkins, 1987), if you want to develop design skills in your students, you will need to give them extensive and varied practice and talk about it with them. If students do not know the authoring program ahead of time, you need to be prepared to spend time teaching the technology. However, as MS-3 teachers said, after the first year, students will know how to do it, and probably can and will teach others how to do it. Learning the technology, doing the research, and putting together a polished project will probably take about 6-8 weeks at the high school level and a semester at the middle school level. Don't expect it to be perfect or smooth the first time around. You might consider collaborating with someone in a related subject area, either an expressive area (art, journalism, or English) or a content area (history, social studies, mathematics). Interdisciplinary projects are recommended. Keep a journal of what worked and what didn't, how long it took, and what events took place when. Do the project in the fall, not the spring.

Researchers need to follow up on some of the questions raised by this set of case studies. For example, at what age can learners best benefit from design work and what kinds of support do they need? If researchers can locate a community in which project-based activities connected to people and the community take place in science throughout the schooling years, they might also be able to answer the question of whether this kind of work could really make a difference in whether students stick with a subject like science, as Oakes and RAND (1990) contend. These questions suggest the need for longitudinal studies.

On a more short-term basis, research needs to examine the relationship we observed between audience and self esteem. For example, what would be the effects on personal investment in a project of having the students choose the audience and of having them know from the beginning the who, how, and when of the presentation? What might it be like to use formative evaluation techniques or beta testing on a project before presenting it to the valued audience? Another important question is the motivational value of multimedia: Is it simply a novelty effect, or does it remain motivating as learners develop their design skills? There must be a number of communities now in which learners have done this kind of work for a couple of years, and we should study the changes in students as they learn to design.

There are many questions to be answered about the processes and outcomes involved in multimedia design projects. But we are encouraged by this and other early research on constructivist classrooms to continue asking these questions and working with teachers and students. Many of the answers seem likely to come from qualitative research.

Copyright © 1996, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.