Students’ development of socio-scientific reasoning in a mobile augmented reality learning environment

ABSTRACT

In this study we investigated how a newly developed learning environment that integrates mobile augmented reality (AR) technology supported students’ socio-scientific reasoning (SSR). Drawing upon the reasoned action theory, we consider the roles of students’ attitudes toward SSR before learning, and their cognitive and emotional engagement during learning in the students’ actual performance of SSR. The implementation results indicate the impact of the learning environment on students’ scientific knowledge and attitude change. Moreover, we identified a significant path of how the students developed their SSR by the interactions among their attitude toward SSR, and their cognitive and emotional engagement in the mobile AR learning environment. On the other hand, the students’ post-learning attitudes toward SSR were dominated by their pre-learning attitudes. Implications and suggestions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Augmented reality
• socio-scientific issue (SSI)
• reasoning
• engagement
• attitude

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Hsin-Yi Chang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9659-1022

Ying-Shao Hsu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1635-8213

Hsin-Kai Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0018-9969

Chin-Chung Tsai http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7744-9971

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number MOST103-2511-S-011-010-MY5] and the Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.