Exploring the use of Wiki in a secondary school science project

Abstract

This study explores the use of wiki in supporting a science project undertaken in a Hong Kong secondary school through a mixed method approach involving triangulation of questionnaire survey, interviews, and analysis of students? wikis. The findings showed positive results on students? motivations, enjoyments, effort input, and perceived value. More important, the results highlighted the fact that satisfaction of students? perceived needs from teacher?s autonomy support improves their attributes, attitudes, and expectations of learning outcomes in general. The researcher identifies a discrepancy between students? expectations and their actual achievements of the learning outcomes. Specifically, students think in a higher order and construct knowledge at a wider level when comparing with what they have expected whereas their expectations of generic skills development significantly outweighed what they have actually achieved. To bridge this discrepancy, the researcher suggested that (a) flexibly balancing the structure and freedom of wiki, (b) carefully planning the project duration, (c) scaffolding in wiki project, (d) carefully choosing of the project topics, (e) explicitly emphasizing the learning outcomes, and (f) raising students? information literacy are all essential. The findings also indicated the exists of limitations in this small scale study and thus further investigations on the pedagogical challenges of integrating wiki in science project learning are required.