he following work attempts to determine how primary school students use multimedia and visualisations in learning materials in science subjects. For the diploma thesis, we conducted a study involving second graders from a primary school in the region Central Slovenia. 42 students (22 boys and 20 girls) were included in the study by means of an eye tracker and a written test and were randomly divided into two experimental groups. We focused on whether the students were able to learn independently with the help of multimedia materials and how they were successful in doing so. The first group of students received learning material from a science textbook on learning about the environment. For the second group of students we enhanced the materials with content explanations and added enhanced learning materials. We introduced these changes to make it easier for the second group of students to understand the content of learning materials.
The results indicate that the changes we made to the materials were beneficial.
We found that both groups were equally successful in solving tasks that included reading maps and legends. We concluded that students would be able to master cartographic skills faster if they were given a map of an already familiar environment at the beginning of the study process. Teachers need to be aware of the student's cognitive level and adapt the tasks accordingly.
By adding appropriate visual elements to the teaching materials (in our case maps, the experiment with a plastic bottle and graphic representations) we can improve their' understanding of the topic. We found that the students in the second group were able to present their answers better than the students in the first group because of the enhanced learning material. Heatmaps also showed us that the students of the second group were able to concentrate better on the essential elements of the learning material.
Working with concrete materials continues to play a key role in teaching. The learning material must be developed step by step, starting with the concrete and moving on tomore abstract.
Our research shows that the teachers have an important role in guiding the students. However, the teacher should use multimedia materials to support the learning process. Multimedia materials are effective as long as they do not contain too much irrelevant information.
For further research, it would be useful to conduct an experiment in the classroom, in which one group of students is learning the subject matter through multimedia material and the other group is explained the same subject matter by the teacher.
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