Abstract:
This paper discusses student and teacher perceptions of a new development in the use of the predict observe-
explain (POE) strategy. This development involves the incorporation of POE tasks into a
multimedia computer program that uses real-life, digital video clips of difficult, expensive, time
consuming or dangerous scenarios as stimuli for these tasks. The program was created by the first
author to be used by pairs of secondary physics students to elicit their conceptions of force and
motion and encourage discussion about these views. In this computer learning environment, students
were required to type full sentence responses that were recorded by the computer for later analysis
by the researcher. Other data sources for this study included audio and video recordings of student
discussions, interviews with selected students and their teachers, classroom observations, and student
questionnaires. This paper will report on some findings from the study, focussing on student and
teacher perceptions of the computer-mediated POE tasks. The findings have implications for the
effective use of multimedia to enhance meaningful learning in science classrooms.
