Middle school students’ learning of mechanics concepts through engagement in different sequences of physical and virtual experiments

ABSTRACT

Physical and virtual experimentation are thought to have different affordances for supporting students’ learning. Research investigating the use of physical and virtual experiments to support students’ learning has identified a variety of, sometimes conflicting, outcomes. Unanswered questions remain about how physical and virtual experiments may impact students’ learning and for which contexts and content areas they may be most effective. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined eighth grade students’ (N = 100) learning of physics concepts related to pulleys depending on the sequence of physical and virtual labs they engaged in. Five classes of students were assigned to either the: physical first condition (PF) (n = 55), where students performed a physical pulley experiment and then performed the same experiment virtually, or virtual first condition (VF) (n = 45), with the opposite sequence. Repeated measures ANOVA’s were conducted to examine how physical and virtual labs impacted students’ learning of specific physics concepts. While we did not find clear-cut support that one sequence was better, we did find evidence that participating in virtual experiments may be more beneficial for learning certain physics concepts, such as work and mechanical advantage. Our findings support the idea that if time or physical materials are limited, using virtual experiments may help students understand work and mechanical advantage.

KEYWORDS:

• Physics
• simulations
• laboratory science
• middle school

Acknowledgements

We thank our collaborators, Hari Narayanan at Auburn University and Sanjay Rebello at Purdue University, for their input into the development of this study. We also thank the teachers and students who participated in and made this study possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported in part by U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Grant No. R305A080507 and the U.S. National Science Foundation Education Core Research Program, Grant No. DRL-1431904.