TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES FOR INTEGRATING MULTIMEDIA TOOLS IN SCIENCE TEACHING

Until a few decades ago, text has been the major mode used to teach scientific material and books have been the major teaching tool (Moreno, Mayer, Spires, & Lester, 2001). But, since scientists made microscopic phenomena visible by creating images of atoms, molecular structures, crystal formations, chemical bonding, cellules and electrical circuits, soon its use was found in science education. The use of visualizations in science and science education, especially in chemistry, has ever-increasing during the last decades. Nowadays, visualizations are a part of scientific practice that could influence science education (Linn, 2003). This author argues that visualizations can help experts to test new ideas and reveal certain aspects of scientific phenomena displaying new insights and allow comparisons with different scenarios. By other hand, visualizations are also important to students as they can illustrate an idea that words cannot describe and in the same way can introduces students to important aspects of scientific research that are frequently neglected in science education. With the development of ICT (Information and communication technology) the use of visualizations has increase strongly, both in science and science education. The number and type of visualizations available have extended and its access became much easier. According to Moreno and Mayer (2007), it considers visualizations the non-verbal mode of represent content knowledge, which includes photos, illustrations, graphics, drawings, maps, animations, simulations and video. Throughout technology it is possible to combine verbal and non-verbal modes and create multimedia or multimodal (Moreno & Mayer, 2007) learning environments. These learning environments represent knowledge in to different modes (verbal and non-verbal) and frequently use two modalities: auditory and visual, i.e., through the ears and through Celeste Ferreira University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Mónica Baptista University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Agnaldo Arroio University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Abstract. Since the widespread introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education the use of multimedia environments has increased substantially. This qualitative study analyse how teachers integrate multimedia tools into teaching and learning sequences (TLS) in science education. Four in-service teachers’ groups have been investigated across a 40 h teachers’ training course to analyse their pedagogical strategies and difficulties for introducing multimedia tools in science teaching. During the training program to discuss multimedia environments teachers (n=14) were invited to build teaching learning sequences (TLS) about some science content using multimedia tools. The results obtained through a content analysis suggest that these teachers are integrating multimedia tools mostly to enhance particular concepts and skills (integrated approach) than to innovate presentations (enhancement approach). In all cases teachers adopted structured tasks and in two of these they were not aware of the necessity to make explicit links between the multimedia tools and the other activities. Some difficulties related to pedagogical approaches and teachers’ knowledge are discussed.