Design And Effect Of Integrating Self-explanation Into A Scientific Simulation Learning Environment

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of scientific simulation teaching that involves a self-explanation strategy on junior high school students’ academic achievement,learning attitude,learning engagement,learning motivation,reflective thinking and task load index,as well as to discuss students’ online learning behaviour patterns and characteristics in a scientific simulation learning environment.Based on the theoretical foundation and implementation concepts of self-explanation strategies,this study explicitly transforms and suggests four scientific exploration stages of“Prediction-Simulation-Explanation-Conclusion”(PSEC),which are planned and developed into the creation of the scientific simulation learning environment.This study adopts a nonequivalent pretest-posttest design and conducts a six-week teaching trial.Two class 37 seventh junior high school students from Jilin Changchun were invited to participate in this study.Students were assigned to the experimental group(n=18)and control group(n=19).The outcomes of tests,questionnaires,and behavioural analyses revealed that(1)academic performance was higher in the experimental group who received scientific simulation learning incorporating self-explanation than in the control group who received no-strategy scientific simulation learning,and the difference was significant;(2)the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of learning engagement,motivation,and task load index,but there was no difference between the two groups in terms of learning attitudes and reflective thinking;(3)students in the experimental group appeared more continuous sequences of prediction and simulation behaviors,and demonstrated more “prediction-simulation-explanation” behaviour patterns.Finally,discussions and suggestions for integrating self-explanation into scientific simulation learning are presented.