Instruktionen kohärent anlegen und Kompetenzaufbau untersuchen: Zugänge und Herausforderungen am Beispiel experimentbezogener Kompetenz

Adapting instruction to students’ prior knowledge and skills is relevant to foster students’ learning of science content as well as their learning of scientific practices (such as conducting an experiment) successfully. Developing such coherent instructions is also important because it allows to investigate the mechanisms by which students’ competences develop and improve. In the study presented in this paper, we used theoretical considerations and empirical evidence about students’ learning to develop a sequenced instruction that aims at fostering students’ experiment-related competence (formulating questions and hypotheses, planning investigations, analyzing and interpreting data). The instruction has a total duration of five school lessons and was administered to 12 upper secondary classes during their regular physics lessons. Pre-Post-test measures and video recordings during instruction were used to investigate how experiment-related competence is developed and how the instruction is used by the students. The paper focuses on the two different video-based approaches employed to analyze the development of students’ competence (category-based analyses of activities and qualitative content analyses of the conceptions of individual students). Based on exemplary results, we discuss several challenges of connecting these approaches with the results from the written test. For instance, the results of the written tests suggest that the instruction has a significant impact on students’ experimental competence, whereas the video data shows that even groups with a similar increase in competence vary considerably in their activities. Therefore, based on the test results, we have some indications for the coherence of our instruction, but at the same time we are not able to identify a clear relationship between students’ pre to post competence increase and their activity patterns or the development of their individual conceptions.