This case study reports on how students, working collaboratively, interpret and construct a written report of the events described in animated educational software. The analysis is based on video recordings of two upper-secondary-school students while they are endeavouring to construe an animated sequence of the mouldering process. How the students grammatically construct their written account by means of available semiotic resources (i. e., animation and educational text) provided by the software is investigated. The results show that attentionally detected features of the animation take the role of active subjects in the students' description of the animated phenomena. When framing their sentences, the students derive noun phrases from animated active subjects and from the educational text. In the students' efforts to express themselves in their own words, they use verbs that differ from the educational text. These two actions together contribute to giving the students' description of the process a character of a non-scientific explanation. Lacking relevant subject matter knowledge, the students cannot judge whether they have given an adequate account or not. The only way that the students have to appraise their written report is to check if it is grammatically correct. It is concluded that it is essential to consider both cultural and semiotic processes when designing technology-supported educational approaches to the teaching of scientific concepts. © 2010 International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc.; Springer Science + Business Media, LLC.

This paper presents an analysis of the scientific reasoning of a dyad of secondary school students about the phenomenon of dissolution of gases in water as they work on this in a simulated laboratory experiment. A web-based virtual laboratory was developed to provide learners with the opportunity to examine the influence of physical factors on gas solubility in water. An evaluation process involving 180 students revealed that the concepts connected to the dissolution of gas in water caused problems for the students even after having experimented with the virtual laboratory. To investigate the nature of learners' reasoning about the visualised events, 13 video-recorded groups of learners were analysed. This study follows the reasoning of one group that displayed a possibly productive way of solving the problem. The results address the students' general difficulty of discovering something that they are conceptually unprepared for within the virtual laboratory. The analysis shows how the students eventually found a way out of their dilemma by making an analogy with other dissolving processes. In effect, the analysis elucidates some of the analytical work that had to be done by the participants when collaboratively negotiating a shared meaning of a scientific concept in concord with a given task and set of instructional materials. Implications for design might be to provide the learning material with explicit hints that enable students to connect to specific phenomena related to the one investigated concept. The findings show the usefulness of video analytic research, informed by CA and ethnomethodology. This analytical framework can support design processes and provide useful information, which might identify hurdles to learning a scientific concept by simulated events and pathways to overcome these hurdles. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.