Abstract_Kanaporn

THE EFFECTS OF USING PHENOMENON-BASED LEARNING
APPROACH DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON
STUDENTS’ CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING ON
THE MEASURES OF CENTRAL TENDENCY.

Kanaporn Huaihongthong1*, Songchai Ugsonkid1,

Wandee Kasemsukpipat1, Sakon Tangkawsakul1

1Department of Education, Faculty of Education, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand

* E-mail for Corresponding Author; E-mail: [email protected], Tel. +66970850150

Abstract
Due to the COVID -19 pandemic, education in all levels have adopted online teaching as an
emergency measure. This change affects students learning opportunities especially, in large groups or
interacting with peers. It results in students’ lack of interest and understanding. Phenomenon-Based
Learning (PhBL) is a student-centered teaching approach, which students learn through investigating
and solving real-life problems and actively discover the knowledge and skills required to solve them.
Thus, we designed to implement this approach to enhance students’ conceptual understanding and
student interaction.

The research questions were 1) does the PhBL increase student interaction during the lesson?
and 2) how do the students express their conceptual knowledge on the measures of central tendency?
The target group was 87 twelfth grade students, who were in Arts - Language Program from a school
in Bangkok, Thailand. The students were requested to conduct projects on the theme “Covid-19 in My
Perspectives”. They had to select their preference topics requiring knowledge of the Measures of Central
Tendency and their experiences to solve or make sense the real problems. The data from students’
projects and a test aiming to assess students’ conceptual understanding at the end of lesson were
analyzed to answer the research questions.

The finding showed that using the PhBL approach during Online learning enhanced the
interactions among teachers and students; teacher-to-student and student-to-student interaction
increased. Moreover, the students could choose and calculate the most appropriate measure of central
tendency that describe a dataset depending on the type of data and conditions.

Keywords: Phenomenon-based Learning, COVID - 19 pandemic, The Measures of Central Tendency,
Online Learning, Conceptual Understanding