Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

A quasi‐experimental study was set up in secondary education to study the role of teachers while implementing tablet devices in science education. Three different classroom scripts that guided students and teachers' actions during the intervention on two social planes (group and classroom level) are compared. The main goal was to investigate which classroom script leads to the best results regarding progress in domain‐specific knowledge and inquiry skills. Besides student achievement, students' experiences towards the role of the teacher and students' perceptions towards learning with tablets within the three conditions were investigated.

In the first condition, the classroom script included learning activities that were balanced between the group and the classroom level. In the second condition, the learning activities occurred predominantly on the group level. The third condition entailed the classroom script as the control condition in which the learning activities were situated only on the classroom level, with the tablet used in a traditional way or as ‘book behind glass’. Results show that students perform better on domain‐specific knowledge in the conditions where the teacher intervened on the classroom level. Regarding the acquisition of inquiry skills, students performed best in the condition where the learning activities were balanced between the group and the classroom level. Moreover, students who perceived more structure achieved better. These results indicate that the role of the teacher cannot be ignored in technology‐enhanced learning. Moreover, these results seem to suggest that one of the best apps remains the teacher.