This study originates from an interest in how students interpret scientific concepts demonstrated with animated instructional technologies. Currently, science education makes use of diverse kinds of instructional methods. For the advancement of instruction, new technologies have continuously been employed. Such new instructional technologies have always been accompanied with expectations that they should reform teaching. The availability of IT in schools and the selection of animated displays for instructional purposes provide new opportunities for education. This thesis accounts for three empirical studies of students’ collaborative work with instructional technologies. For the purpose of studying students’ scientific reasoning, two kinds of animated instructional technologies were designed. The three studies focused on designing and exploring the whole educational intervention and are located in the area of design-based research. They provide detailed analyses of secondary school students’ collaboration on an assignment of giving a joint written account of the instructed concept. Analytically, this is done within a socio-cultural framework that uses interaction analysis inspired by ideas from conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Study I and Study II report observations from instructional technologies that deal with the flow of materials in the carbon cycle. The two studies were connected, as the outcomes from the first study informed the educational framing of the second study. Study III reports findings from a sub-study of a design experiment where students worked in a virtual laboratory to learn about the solubility of gas in water. The results from the studies show that students’ reasoning was influenced by several aspects, such as the characteristics of the animated display, language use, school cultural norms, the formulation of the assignment and the students’ pre-knowledge. The analyses also evinced that the students’ interpretation of a demonstrated concept often diverted from a canonical scientific one, which warns against assuming that the collaborative meaning-making of animated instructional technologies automatically leads to a creation of the desired scientific concept. These findings emphasise that when designing and applying animated instructional technologies in education, one has to consider a wider context where assignment formulation, teacher guidance, school culture and semiotic processes influence how students approach and frame their assignment.

Digital learning material is associated with grand expectations among educational policy makers. Several attempts to introduce this new technology with the purpose of enhancing learning have been made in recent years. The schooling system has, however, been rather hesitant and not so ready to adopt this kind of teaching aid. The aim of this thesis is to probe into students‘ practical problems of understanding computerised science learning material involving animated sequences and educational text. For the purpose of this investigation an application describing the different events in the carbon cycle was developed. Two studies present analyses of students‘ reasoning and actions when working collaboratively with the task of making a written account of what is illustrated in the learning material. Both studies present examples of identified phenomena that were observed in more extensive empirical materials. The data is represented by video recordings of students‘ interaction with each other and the interface. Results from the studies reveal students‘ propensity for concentrating their attention to prominent characteristics of the animated display and to describe the animated models in correspondence to their resemblance of objects and occurrences in everyday life. In study II it is revealed how students, when constructing a written report of the described events, derive noun phrases from attentionally detected objects in the animation and from the educational text. In their effort to express themselves in colloquial language, when preparing their report, they deliberately select verbs that differ from the educational text. These courses of action together, contribute to give the report on what happens in the process a non-scientific explanation. It is concluded that students, lacking definite access to the relevant subject matter knowledge, consequently, cannot judge whether they have given an approvable account or not. Findings from the studies show that the school context with its explicit stipulations of assignments and implicit request for expressing oneself in your own words frames the learning and creates conditions for how the technology is used and understood. The results indicate that animated models of scientific concepts risk inferring misconceptions if students are left on their own with interpreting information from the learning material. Despite the detected problems of students‘ interpretations of the described phenomena, the results indicate that animated learning material can proffer an exploitable resource in science education. Such a prospect is the ability of animation to engage students in discussions of the subject and to make them recognise otherwise unobservable phenomena.