Secondary Education Students’ Knowledge Gain and Scaffolding Needs in Mobile Outdoor Learning Settings

Abstract

Science education enhances students’ scientific literacy in order to interact with the world responsibly and contribute to democratic and informed decision-making. The emergence of place-responsive pedagogy and mobile technology with a variety of affordances has refocused attention on students’ direct embodied experience. P-responsive pedagogy combined with mobile technologies provides numerous opportunities for investigating, across contexts, everyday socio-economical environmental problems inherent to a particular location. Forming an evidence-based decision on socio-economical environmental real-life problems requires a more in depth understanding of natural processes than just making use of everyday knowledge that is based on perceptions and direct observations. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the secondary education students’ (a) awareness and understanding about a timely socio-environmental challenge, (b) development of the scientific vocabulary, (c) scaffolding needs during the mobile outdoor collaborative inquiry-based learning event. To fulfill the aims, action research with an experimental technology-enhanced collaborative inquiry learning design was created to investigate students’ knowledge gain and scaffolding needs. Three interventions with a total of 68 secondary education students (age 14–15) were conducted. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results demonstrate the change in students’ opinions about the complex socio-economical environmental challenge and transformation from everyday concepts to more scientific knowledge, and their need for conceptual and procedural scaffolding. This paper adds new insights on how to utilize non-gamified use of mobile technology to empower secondary students’ scientific literacy and understanding in authentic settings.