Digital media offer comprehensive chances for the development of an inclusive school structure (Schulz 2021) and therefore provide opportunities to respond to a constantly growing social heterogeneity (Mecheril/Rangger 2022). This is especially true when it comes to assessing the individual needs of students in the sense of a broad understanding of inclusion (Mitchell 2008; Löser/Werning 2015), both in terms of feedback for learners as well as teachers (Middendorf 2022). At the same time the implementation of such digital media comes with great challenges (Hilbert 2015), which results in a need for an extensive range of training courses for teachers (Schroeder et al. 2021). Teachers need to be able to prepare lessons that are sensitive to heterogeneity, especially in subjects that require complex teaching and learning processes with a high degree of abstraction. Science lessons, and especially scientific experiments, can be seen as particularly challenging, for example regarding material complexity as well as complex tasks for students (Stinken-Rösner et al. 2023).

When preparing scientific experiments, teachers have to consider the most appropriate way of learning for their group of students. Providing small-step instructions might make the experiment easier to follow, but has little cognitive activating effect. Open task formats, on the other hand, can be overwhelming for students (Kleinert et al. 2021). To overcome this challenge, teachers can offer their students an established solution in the form of incremental learning aids. These break down complex tasks into subtasks and provide hints and solutions for each step that students can access independently (ibid.). In combination with digital media, such as an app for the tablet, these learning aids offer further opportunities for differentiation and assessment.

Studies show, that digital media can have a positive effect on the learning outcomes of students (Schroeder 2021) and can be used concerning individualized learning and assessment (Zhang/Nouri 2018). For science lessons, it has been shown that digital media have the potential to break down barriers (Stinken-Rösner et al. 2023). Often however, digital media are used less frequently in a sense of a broad understanding of inclusion, addressing individual needs of all students, but instead rather focus on specific groups, such as students with special educational needs (Quenzer-Alfred et al. 2023)

The joint research project of ‘DiLernProfis’ (short for: Learning process oriented diagnostics and didactics - digital incremental scaffolds as a professionalization concept for adaptive teaching), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is positioned within this discourse by focusing on the use of a web application in inclusive science classes. The app allows teachers to create incremental scaffolds and implement them in their lessons. These incremental scaffolds allow all students to complete complex tasks, such as experimentation, independently. At the same time, it allowed both students and teachers to access diagnostic information on the spot. For this, a teacher-training program has been created and carried out, preparing the teachers for the development and application of incremental scaffolds. Our sub-project focused specifically on the practices within the classes, especially regarding inclusive and exclusive potentials of the app, for example whether all students could use the app according to their individual needs and skills. For this, we used an ethnographic approach including lesson observations and interviews with students and teachers. The findings of our sub-project were used to further develop the app (for example regarding the implementation of diagnostic functions), the incremental scaffolds (for example regarding the question design) as well as the teacher training (for example regarding the contents of each training session).

The project used an ethnographic approach and was structured into two phases of data collection. In each phase, a training course was organised to prepare the participating teachers for the creation and use of their incremental learning aids. Teachers first used up to two evaluated learning aids for experimentation in their lessons and then developed their own learning aid. In between the two phases, adjustments to the app as well as the training course were made. The ethnographic observations and interviews were carried out in the classes of all participating teachers. The ethnographic approach made it possible to follow the teaching process in a flexible and open way, and thus to consider a variety of practices with and around the learning aids. The presence of multiple researchers per lesson allowed for focusing on a number of experimental groups at once. The observations focused on how students and teachers used the app in class, and in the interviews, students and teachers reflected on it. The teacher interviews also considered the training courses. The data analysis was also characterised by openness and flexibility. It was based on the Grounded Theory (Strauss/Corbin 2010) and allowed us to reconstruct key practices from the data through coding. Overall, 53 observation protocols, 7 transcripts of teacher-interviews and 24 transcripts of student-interviews were analysed. Furthermore, the data analysis was based on a praxeological perspective through which we understood the social as emerging from practice (Schatzki 2012). In this practice human actors and material artefacts jointly shape events, while at the same time normative orders come into play (Rabenstein 2018). Our understanding of social reality therefore moves between poststructuralism (the dissolution of an acting subject) and theories of action (artefacts as tools) (Hirschauer 2016). Through this theoretical approach, we were able to understand the use of the app in the complex social situations of the science classes, and to draw conclusions about its role in the different interactions. Our praxeological perspective, the ethnographic observations, the interviews and the analysis strategy thus were in a synergistic relationship, which proved to be a suitable framework for our projects objective. Findings about the actual teaching practices with the app allowed us to draw conclusions for the further development of the app and the training concept as well as general findings about the use of digital media in science experiments at school.

The research project ‘DiLernProfis’ took place from 2021 to 2024 and focused on the development and the use of a web-app for inclusive science experiments as well as a teacher training regarding the app. Our sub-project supported these goals by reconstructing classroom practice concerning activities the app in order to reveal its inclusive and exclusive potential. The analysis of observation protocols and interviews revealed that the app was used in quite different ways. Often the app was used as intended, as an optional source of help in situations where students could not complete the task on their own. This allowed the teachers to focus on other parts of the lesson without having to provide constant individual support during experimentation. The app has also shown potential in terms of assessment for both teachers and students. Additionally teachers proved to be creative in their use of the app, using it outside the intended format, for example for ranked quizzes. However, various limiting factors were observed as well. In some cases, for example, the students rejected the app, as they saw it as a symbol of dependence on help. The experiment in the observed lesson proved to be a materially challenging situation. This was compounded by additional technical problems in using the app (e.g. unreliable Wi-Fi). In addition, sometimes students used the hints and solutions of the app without trying to solve the tasks independently first. Nevertheless it was shown, that the app use became more and more secure over time, as students and teachers used it more routinely. A factor highlighted by the observation that older students struggled less with it. At ECER 2025, we want to discuss the potentials and limitations of digital incremental scaffolds, as well as digital media in general, for science experiments in inclusive classrooms.

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