Preliminary results from a recent experiment held in a Southland Girls’ High School science class, have shown that students taught with the aid of an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) achieved better learning outcomes than students taught by traditional methods.
As a participant school in Project ACTIVate, Southland Girls’ High School science teacher Robyn Garden, is evaluating the effectiveness of Promethean ACTIV Board IWBs on student motivation and achievement in science.
“IWBs are much more engaging. Students really do seem to get a better feeling and understanding of the whole topic….we know they work, we just have to prove they work,” says Robyn.
As part of her research into student achievement, Robyn took two similarly streamed Year 10 science classes, and divided them into control group, which had traditional study resources, such as textbooks and overhead projector slides, while the experimental group used only the IWB.
Robyn pre-tested the students and benchmarked them against the Ministry of Education’s subject progression indicators - curriculum exemplars. One of the science exemplars requires students’ to be able to express a scientific explanation for an occurrence. In pre-testing both groups averaged two out of a possible five, with two being denoted as a student having only a limited ability to develop and express a scientific explanation for an occurrence. A score of five is the ability to give a well-reasoned and coherent explanation for an occurrence, and is the level Year 10 students’ are expected to achieve across all subjects before they progress onto NCEA.
With natural disasters as the topic, each group received three weeks of tuition aided by either the IWB or textbooks. At topic end, the groups were tested against the curriculum exemplars again and the results were marked by contrast.
Eleven of the control group were reassessed as achieving to a level three standard, while 10 were assessed at level four, and only one student attained level five.
However, it was the opposite for the experimental group, where 11 students reached the level five standard, nine gained level four, and only two gained level three.
Although disappointed with the control group’s results, Robyn is delighted with the experimental group results as it was the proof she was hoping for. But to prove it wasn’t a one off or fluke, Robyn is repeating the exercise but is swapping the groups over and giving them a different topic.
Due for completion at the end of the year, Robyn will hand her findings over to Massey University’s ICT specialist and Project ACTIVate project partner, Professor Ken Ryba, for assessment.
