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Hands-on learning has been advocated to motivate students and enhance their learning. It refers to acquiring knowledge and skills from learners’ own experiences and placing learners’ participation in practice at the center of the learning process. Students engaging in hands-on activities were able to analyze their own learning experience through reflection, evaluation, and reconstruction to draw ideas from the current experience in light of their prior experience (Andresen, Boud, & Cohen, 2000). Students participating in hands-on learning considered the course to be interesting, valuable, meaningful, and motivating (Bruguier & Greathouse-Amador, 2012). However, ideas that develop without any prior knowledge of the subject may be wrong. For example, when determining the causes of science events, people reason linearly rather than systemically and use obvious variables rather than considering nonobvious variables (Hung, 2008). People make assumptions concerning the causes and effects of phenomena and have expectations for the behavior of nonobvious, implicit causes and effects in scientific phenomena (Grotzer & Bell, 1999). People also tend to intuitively identify causal relationships, which often results in wrong ideas (Barbas & Psillos, 1997; Hung, 2008; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). For example, when considering pressure and why a balloon partially deflates when driving from the mountains to the coast, students reason using obvious agents, such as a hole in the balloon, rather than considering differences in air pressure between the two regions. When students are not aware that pressure is a possible option in their causal reasoning, they may turn to concrete, though incorrect, obvious causes to explain pressure-related situations (Hung, 2008).
Regarding technology-supported scientific phenomena that students have never experienced, their reasoning and learning of technology and related science may be a challenge because it is much easier to focus on the most obvious single concrete variable as an explanation rather than consider the interaction between multiple abstract variables. Moreover, science has problems with the specific terminology and scientific language. In particular, involved substances, mathematics, and symbols are not clearly differentiated (Barke et al., 2009). Moreover, inappropriate teaching methods and materials may bring students wrong ideas about the subject content. The problem of the use of inappropriate teaching methods can be solved by equipping teachers with appropriate pedagogical resources, such as by recommending alternative strategies to the traditional approaches and using more structured teaching models (Barke et al., 2009). Inappropriate materials, especially those found online, can mislead students and should be avoided by equipping students with digital literacy, such as the ability to critically evaluate the credibility of data. More importantly, the learning design should aim to help students develop more complex, scientific reasoning skills as well as more systemic and rational thinking when exploring concepts.
This study uses the example of holograms, a technology that has been rapidly increasing in importance for the applications of scientific visualization and measurement, video gaming, as well as film and television. However, many websites, such as YouTube, provide inaccurate information on holograms. There are many YouTube videos on how to use smartphones for creating three-dimensional (3D) images, which many web users claim to be holograms. These videos are misused by some teachers as teaching material for hands-on learning.
This study addressed this challenge by proposing a model and emphasizing the importance of a developmental learning process to guide students in using technology and exploring related science concepts. Instead of evaluating the proposed model in a students’ learning the proposed model was evaluated by in-service teachers to justify its educational value and identify challenges teachers may encounter while implementing it. These results and discussions were expected to broaden the spectrum of teacher training about the adoption of web materials in hands-on education.