Hands-on and Minds-on Practical Activities and Visualisation

21

the use of indigenous technical knowledge in the study might also debunk the belief that modern technology is not the only viable alternative to enhance learners’ understanding.

22

(PEEOE)⁴ should be the focus during practical activities. It is therefore imperative that teachers’ moral and personal commitment to teaching science well, with hands-on practical activities and other interactive activities, has an impact on their enjoyment of science activities (Turner & Ireson, 2010). According to Shifafure (2014), science teachers should plan that practical activities be conducted at reasonable times so that all necessary materials can be sorted beforehand and where there is a shortage of materials, local accessible materials can be brought in to fill the void. Nikodemus (2017) and Asheela et al. (2021) agree with Shifafure (2014) that practical activities should be selected with a clear intended purpose, otherwise they will not yield the desired outcome.

For instance, Nikodemus’s (2017) study conducted in Namibia concluded that practical activities have a greater potential for meaningful learning if they are carefully designed to focus on the key scientific concepts to be developed and how these concepts are linked. Nikodemus (2017) extends that teachers should be encouraged to design practical activities that encourage individual and group work, thereby involving learners as partners in knowledge creation, rather than only receivers of knowledge. It should be recognised also that practical activities are a form of visualisation. As a result, they had a potential to motivate learners to learn science since learners can visualise concepts.

Visual representations are critical in the communication of science concepts (Mathewson, 1999). It unfolds ideas in science lessons, and it has been widely used in science education to represent scientific concepts for many years (Cook, 2006; Gilbert, 2008). Moreover, Ferreira, Baptista, and Arroio (2013) argued that visualisations are important to learners as they can illustrate an idea that words cannot describe and in the same way can introduce learners to important aspects of scientific research that are frequently neglected in science education. In the context of the study, it was hoped that the practical demonstration on the blast furnace would visualise the hidden scientific concepts or phenomenon since visualisations provide realistic representations of the world.

4 PEEOE stands for Predict-Explain-Explore-Observe-Explain

23

The Junior Secondary Certificate (JSC) examiner’s report (Namibia. MEAC, 2015) emphasises that demonstrations and letting learners do experiments are proven to help learners to achieve maximum performance. The findings of the JSC examiner’s report (Namibia. MEAC, 2015) concurred with Roschelle (1995) that learning within contexts can validate learners’ past experiences and prior knowledge and increase learner’s willingness to participate and be actively engaged.

The Physical Science subject requires learners to be practically engaged in the context of the lesson. Thus, it can be done through visualisation as it had proven to be effective in enhancing learning. However, not all visual representations necessarily lead to better learning results (Cook, 2005). For example, learners had more difficulty understanding graphics than initially assumed (Wu, Krajcik, & Soloway, 2001). Teachers should thus be cautious in the selection of the visuals they use in their classrooms, otherwise it might not yield the intended results.

Ainsworth (2006) postulates that when learners interact with appropriate representations their performance might be enhanced. Visualisations include solid physical objects or immaterial light projections that utilise images, sounds, text, textures, and other perceptual modifications to convey complex information (Rapp & Kurby, 2008). The use of visualisations in science education relating to the cognitive domain has the role of making invisible concepts/ideas visible but also to illustrate abstract concepts and make them concrete (Rundgren & Yao, 2014). Thus, bringing visuals into the classroom is synonymous to bringing reality to the class that learners can make meaning out of. For example, Kelly and Jones (2006) investigated how learners’ explanations of the dissolution of sodium chloride were affected by viewing two animations of the particulate nature of the dissolution of sodium chloride. The investigation found that the particulate animations had a positive influence on the explanations the learners provided of both particulate structures and the functional aspects of dissolution, and they often incorporated features displayed in the animations.

Science concepts, ideas, and methods had a great richness of visual relationships that are intuitively representable in a variety of ways. The use of visual representations is clearly very beneficial from the point of view of their presentation to others, their manipulation when solving problems and when doing research (Guzman, 2002). Presmeg (1992) described visualisation as an aid to understanding. It offers a method of seeing the unseen and we are

24

encouraged and should aspire to ‘see’ not only what comes ‘within sight’, but also what we are unable to see (Arcavi, 2003).

The interpretation of visualisations is highly related to prior knowledge (Tibell & Rundgren, 2010). Thus, learners’ prior knowledge plays an enormous role in the acquisition of science concepts, as Cook (2005) alludes that learners construct an understanding from visual representations on the foundation of their existing knowledge, since visualisation is highly related to learners’ prior knowledge (Cook, 2006; Wu, Lin & Hsu, 2013). It also depends upon the notion of scaffolding to facilitate learning (Rapp & Kurby, 2008). Murphy (2009) suggests that visualisation processes can meaningfully scaffold the teaching of conceptual understanding of mathematical concepts. However, not only in mathematics but even in science as science provides a body of phenomena, facts, and ideas that can be visualised through both reading and mathematical representations (Gilbert, 2008).

Mayer (2001) argued that relevant prior knowledge facilitates the referential connections made between the visual and verbal mental models. Learners can be engaged and encouraged to participate more actively in learning and the teachers’ role could become more focused on enabling learning through interactions (Webb, 2010). Visualisation is not a panacea, (Rundgren

& Yao, 2014), so firstly, teachers need to know the key features linked to the concepts embedded in the specific visualisation and how to direct learners’ attention towards it.

Visualisation can serve as a mediating tool for IK re-contextualisation of science. Kaino (2013) notes that the artefacts that are available in the environment are important tools that can be used to mediate between what is usually taught in the classroom and what exists outside the classroom. However, Mosimege and Onwu (2004) point out that effective re-contextualisation of IK depends on how the teacher deals with the knowledge in the classroom, and how the curriculum design allows the consideration of such knowledge.