Video Analysis As A Tool For Understanding Science Instruction

Research on science instruction has revealed complex and nontrivial relations between instructional variables – including school system characteristics, teacher cognition and beliefs, teachers’ and students’ activities during instruction and last but not least, learning outcomes. To further investigate these relations, the development of respective models as well as appropriate research designs and methodologies are required. This will allow for tracing effects to the instructional level, shedding light on the well-known gap between teachers’ demands and students’ efforts as well as for the creation of interventions to overcome this gap. To this end, variables of teaching and learning have to be investigated using low- and high-inferent video analyses. Students’ and teachers’ behaviour holds valuable information for identifying cause-effect relations between what happens in the classroom and targeted outcomes.