Probes Help Younger Students Learn Science

The TEEMSS project provides evidence of student learning with probes.

By Andy Zucker

The good news: research demonstrates that using data collection probes helps high school students learn many science concepts better and more quickly. Over 50% of U.S. high school science teachers are using such probes with their students. The not-so-good news: there has been far less use of probes by younger students and little research to determine if using probes can help them, too.

With the completion of the Technology Enhanced Elementary and Middle School Science (TEEMSS) project, the Concord Consortium is delighted to fill this research gap and report some good news for younger learners.¹ TEEMSS created, disseminated, and conducted research on 15 technology-based science units for students in grades 3 to 8. We found that, indeed, probes do help these students learn science.

Five units were created for each grade level (3-4, 5-6, and 7-8), targeting NSES standards for Inquiry, Physical Science, Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and Technology and Engineering. Each unit contains two investigations with a discovery question, several trials, analysis, and further investigations. TEEMSS also developed teacher supports, including an online professional development course and teacher guides. Teachers and students could use the activities with just about any combination of computer and probe. Our probeware software technology runs on handheld computers or desktops running Windows or Mac OS, and with interfaces and probes from any major vendor (Data Harvest, Fourier, ImagiWorks, Pasco, Texas Instruments, and Vernier). The National Science Foundation provided funding for TEEMSS.

Extensive testing

Almost 70 teachers in 18 school districts worked with the project. Teachers used TEEMSS units in 2004-2005, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007. School year 2005-2006 was the one in which the largest numbers of teachers and students used project materials. Participants that year included 24 grade 3-4 teachers, ten grade 5-6 teachers, and eight grade 7-8 teachers, teaching a total of 1,183 students. Data were also collected in 2004-2005 from 21 teachers who taught the same topics as many of the TEEMSS units, but without using the TEEMSS materials, including probes and computers. Data from those classes provided a non-TEEMSS comparison group.

Positive opinions

Not surprisingly, teachers and students discovered that probes are terrific tools for inquiry-based teaching and learning. One teacher wrote,

“I was amazed at how the students made predictions that I was not even thinking about. On the temperature lesson, a student noticed that there was more humidity on the other side of the room than where he was due to the amount of students that were working on the other side of the room. That was very interesting to them.”

And another said,

“The aha moment that comes to mind is seeing the kids’ reactions when they discovered on their own the voltage of parallel versus series circuits and how they related to the battery voltage. This is a very exciting way to teach and extremely motivating to students.”

According to one student,

“The thing I liked most about the activities was that we actually got to see what would happen rather than just learning about it.”

The teachers rated various features of TEEMSS. As a group they reported that TEEMSS is useful for teaching science, and they and their students liked doing the investigations. Among the features they most appreciated about using the probes was that students were able to figure things out for themselves, and see graphs immediately as they did the experiments. Students, too, reported that they liked doing science using probes and computers, and being able to design their own experiments.

After using TEEMSS, teachers reported that the probes were easy to use, and in the future they would be more likely to use technology to teach science.

Student's gains on tests by the same teachers in successive years.
* indicates a statistically significant difference.

Teaching science effectively

Among the research questions we wanted to answer was whether students learned science using the TEEMSS units. For all 12 units that include pre- and post-tests, the answer is clear; they did, as demonstrated by significant gains between students’ scores on the two tests.²

An important but more difficult question is whether students who used probes and computers learned more science than students who studied the same topics without using probeware. To answer that question, we combed through our data looking for groups of teachers who taught particular science units without the TEEMSS materials one year (in other words, teaching as they usually taught) and who then taught the same topics using TEEMSS the following year. For those cases, the big difference from year to year is whether or not the teachers used TEEMSS units, including probes. Because the same teachers are being compared from year to year, any difference in results would not be due to the teachers.

Because participating teachers were able to make choices about what they taught, only some of the topics were taught that way, i.e., without using probes one year and then the following year with TEEMSS and probes. We found such cases for eight of the topics and were eager to analyze those data.

What we discovered was that there were statistically significant differences favoring the TEEMSS students for four of the eight units (Sound, grades 3-4; Electricity, grades 3-4; Temperature, grades 5-6; and Motion, grades 7-8).

On the other hand, there were no significant differences between TEEMSS and non-TEEMSS students for the other four units (Sensing, Levers and Machines, Plants, and Pressure). For those units, using probes seemed neither to increase nor decrease what students learned, compared to those students not using probes.³

For the units favoring the use of TEEMSS, we wanted to know how much more the students learned when they used probes. “Effect size” is the accepted measure one uses to answer this question. An effect size of 0.2 standard deviations is considered small, 0.5 standard deviations is medium, and an effect size of 0.8 standard deviations is considered large. An effect size of 0.5, for example, means that, on average, students in the experimental group (in this case, those who used probes) perform at about the 69th percentile compared to students in the non-experimental group. In other words, instead of the average student performing at the 50th percentile, an effect size of 0.5 means that the average student performs at the 69th percentile—a considerable improvement.

For the four units showing significant gains, the effect sizes favoring TEEMSS were 0.58, 0.94, 1.54, and 0.49, respectively. Gains are shown in the figure on page 4. Effect sizes were computed based on the gains, the numbers of students taking each test, and other factors.

Conclusions

Many studies have reported positive impacts of using digital technology to teach science.⁴ But there have been only a limited number of earlier studies of the use of probes in elementary and middle schools, and those studies were often done with small numbers of students. The TEEMSS results are newsworthy both because they are based on a greater number of students (over 1,000) and because the effect sizes we found are larger than in prior studies; for the four TEEMSS units on which statistically significant differences favored TEEMSS students, the effect sizes were quite impressive (two medium and two large).⁵

As computers become more common in schools, with entire states (including Maine and Pennsylvania) adopting “one-to-one” laptop programs for students, the smart use of technology has a much better chance than ever to enhance the teaching and learning of science for tens of millions of students. It is time to harness the incredible riches of probes and other digital technology to challenge students and allow them to learn science by collecting and analyzing data from real-world experiments, not only by reading textbooks.

Andy Zucker (azucker@concord.org) is the lead researcher for the TEEMSS project and the author of Transforming Schools with Technology: How Smart Use of Digital Tools Helps Achieve Six Key Education Goals, to be published by Harvard Education Press in January 2008.