Promoting Students’ Mechanistic Reasoning in Physics Through Constructing Stop-Motion Animations: What to Consider?

This study explored students’ stop motion animation (SMA) creation and its association with their mechanistic reasoning (MR). To do so, an exploratory study was conducted with 41 ninth-grade students, who collaboratively worked to construct an SMA about electrostatic phenomena. SMAs and students’ written responses were collected and analyzed. The analysis showed that students’ exhibiting MR was associated with the quality of an SMA as judged according to a certain design, i.e., (1) an SMA presents a state at microscopic levels, and (2) an SMA depicts the change in a state at microscopic levels. Implications on how to implement the construction of SMAs as a pedagogical approach in a classroom to support students in developing MR are discussed, e.g., explicitly challenging students to address lower scale levels in their SMAs.