Abstract:

Combining school curriculum with learning situations in a museum context is a difficult task for visiting classes. Though most teachers find the formal learning as an important goal for excursions, most visits tend to become "soda visits" without preparation, learning goals, and connection to the subjects taught back in school. (Sørensen & Kofod, 2004).To accommodate these challenges at the science museum Experimentarium located in Copenhagen, a cooperation was established with Institute for School and Learning at University College Copenhagen to transform the knowledge acquired during a 5-year flipped learning research project in school context to a flipped learning model that suited the science museum (Lie, 2018). This have resulted in ten flipped learning-inspired lesson plans aimed at visiting classes from 4th to 9th grade (student ages 9 to 15 years). The realistic evaluation study reported in this paper explored issues of context, mechanism and outcome (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) influencing the students cognitive load (Sweller, 1997) and the active learning (Dolin, 2002) before, during and after the visit.

Two datasets were collected:
1) nine test runs with individual test classes. A total of 36 students participated in focus group interview on location before and after the activities in the exhibition. These student interviews were combined with nine teacher interviews (12 participants) and observations of the learning activities.
2) An in-depth test observing a class preparing at the school, during the visit, and again back at school.

The students also created a personal meaning map with terms central to the lesson subject both before and after the lesson, and interviews were conducted again both with the teacher and a group of students. Two of the nine test runs were selected and coded to identify intrinsic, germane and extraneous load and the relation of these to the hypotheses of the CMO-configurations. The in-depth test where also coded for the same themes. The personal meaning map were analyzed to quantify the difference in each individual student’s broadness of related concepts, and deep understanding, and the learning effect of the lesson plan. This paper suggest that the teachers are the most important element for the students learning, and that the flipped learning lessons should prioritize the accessibility of the teacher, in order to free the teacher to facilitate the more complex learning.

The relations between:
1) the accessibility of the model/artefacts involved,
2) the learning goals and
3) the learning prerequisites must be considered before deciding the role of the different elements in the lesson plan.

In general, the questionnaire should scaffold the student’s activities, so most students are able to work independently. The proper use of multimodality in all the elements of the lesson plans have great advantages in reducing the complexity of a visit, which allow students and teacher to focus on teaching and learning.

Keywords:

Flipped learning, technology in education, blended learning, open school, learning videos, museum, science center.