Action research on electrochemistry learning. Conceptual modelling intervention to promote disciplinary understanding, scientific inquiry, and reasoning

Students in engineering-science programmes often struggle with theoretical concepts, while they tend to adopt a surface approach to learning. We suggest that this can be tackled by promoting a specific higher-order thinking skill (HOTS) that enables drawing connections between physical phenomena and theoretical concepts representing them. We designed an intervention to support students in achieving deep insight into electrochemical phenomena, while developing this HOTS. Such intervention aims to scaffold students' learning and development by introducing conceptual modelling as an essential thinking skill of engineering-scientists, and as a strategy to build scientific understanding of natural phenomena. Therefore, conceptual modelling constitutes a main learning objective of this novel course. This paper reports an empirical investigation into how students deal with concepts and complexity, and to what extent the intervention has any measurable effects on the learning outcomes. This phenomenological investigation integrates considerations from various disciplines, and relies on multiple data sources, i.e., students' documents (lab journals and reports), observations of students in action (in discussions with their tutors and while performing lab experiments), and video stimulated-recall interviews. The results show little effect of the intervention, as implemented, suggesting how challenging it is for students (and instructors) to shift from traditional learning-and-teaching approaches, towards an epistemology of knowledge construction for specific problems. The findings are informative for revision of the intervention and generate specific recommendations. Concurrently, our operationalisation of the conceptual framework proves powerful in detecting qualitative differences in HOTS. Plausible implications for research and educational practice in science-engineering education are discussed.