Combining real and virtual activities about electrostatic interactions in primary school

ABSTRACT

The role of virtual simulations in the evolution of primary school students' mental models about electrostatics is investigated by analysing the answers of two groups of 9–10 years old pupils inside instructional sequences that combine two hands-on activities using balloons and jackets with the same activities using PhET simulations: one group followed a sequence where the real experiments were conducted before the virtual simulations, the other group followed a sequence where the virtual simulations where proposed before the real experiments. Students’ answers were categorized into a descriptive dimension (accordance with the phenomena) and into an explanatory dimension (level of adequacy with the microscopic model based on elementary charges). Our results show that, although virtual simulations improve the level of adequacy of students' answers to the target model, this improvement is not transferred to new phenomena, so that the capability of relating the developed model to the real world is the same in both sequences. Moreover, about 40% of pupils remained at their starting non-explanatory level in both teaching sequences. We conclude that simulations per se do not help students in evaluating and refining their models, indicating the need for teachers’ support in modelling-based instruction involving not visible physical entities.

KEYWORDS:

• Modelling
• simulations
• real and virtual
• electrostatics

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Marisa Michelini for helpful discussions and suggestions. We also want to acknowledge to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (reference PGC2018-096581-B-C21) and the ACELEC research group (reference 2017SGR1399).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://phet.colorado.edu/it/simulation/balloons-and-static-electricity.

2 The pilot study represents the core of the thesis in Science Education: ‘Laboratorial sequence Real-Virtual: a comparative survey’ discussed at the University of Calabria, in the framework of the Primary Education degree course (2015–2016).