The effect of multi modal instruction on student?s science achievement and writing skills in an argument based inquiry classroom

Purpose of thisresearch is toinvestigatetheimpact of themultimodalinstruction, which is embeddedwithintheArgumentationBasedScience Learning (ABSL) approach, on student'sscienceacademicachievementduringthelaboratorycourseforpre-service scienceteachers.Theresearchincluded 119 studentswhowere in their 3rdyear in thescienceeducation program at theuniversity. Theimplementationwascarriedoutwith a facultymemberandtwograduateteachingassistantswithin 4 sections. Twoout of 4 sectionswererandomlyregistered as treatmentandothertwowereassigned as controlgroups. Whilethecontrolgroupexperiencedonlythe ABSL approach, thetreatmentgroup had an additionalmultimodalinstruction aside from ABSL approach in theirinstructionaldesign. Inthemultimodalinstructiongrouptherewerethreestages of multimodalinstructionwhichwasimplemented. Withinthefirststagemultimodalrepresentationsandtheirfunctionswerediscussedandstudents? awarenessaboutmodeswereincreased. Inthisstagestudentswereaskedtoanalyzeseveralscienceandtechnologyarticleswhichweretakenfrommagazinesortwopagesfromtheirtextbookstoidentifymodesandtheirfuctions in thetext. Inthesecondstagestudents as a groupwereaskedtoapplymultimodalevaluationrubrictogivensciencebasedtext in ordertoincreasetheunderstanding of modalrepresentationsand how theyhelptogeneratemeaning in a writtencommunication. At the final stagethestudentswereaskedtomake a poster, whichportrayedthetopicsthey had learned in theirsciencelabbyeffectivelyusingthemodalrepresentations. The poster generationstagewassameforthecontrolandtreatmentgroups in whichtheaudiencewasthemiddleschoolstudents. Post test wasimplementedtobothgroups in ordertoinvestigatetheeffect of theinstruction. Theresultsyieldedthatthemultimodalinstructiongroupstatisticallyperformedbetterthanthecontrolgroup.KeysWords: Writing, multimodalrepresentation, scientificliteracy, argumentation