Minds-On: Supporting the Learning of Science Concepts and Reasoning Skills

Minds-On is a novel, theoretically-driven pedagogical approach to
support the teaching and learning of science concepts and reasoning skills in
upper primary science lessons. Minds-On uses a hands-on – minds-on app-
roach interleaving doing experiments with creating interactive concept diagrams.

Lessons are fully orchestrated in the online application. Learners complete the
lessons independently and receive guidance and feedback from the software.
Four lessons have been created combining the following concepts and reasoning
skills: seasons/cause-effect, sound/cause-effect, fixings & animals/classification
and bicycle/systems thinking. The approach has been developed using an itera-
tive design method with evaluations in each phase either in the classroom or in
laboratory conditions. Results from one classroom evaluation (N = 490) showed
that both teachers and learners enjoyed working with the lessons, that learners
are easily able to complete the lessons within the allocated time and that the approach enables learners to effectively apply several types of scientific reasoning and do so more autonomously than in traditional science lessons.

Results from the knowledge questionnaires in a later study of the sound lesson (N = 147) showed a significant increase in score compared to before the lesson. In this demonstration paper, we present the Minds-On approach and associated application, discussing the design process, the theoretical principles on which our approach is based and the preliminary results from recent classroom evaluations.