Comparative Study between Computer Simulated and Hands-on Physics11 (Electricity and Magnetism) Experiments

A major research domain in physics education is focused on studying the effects of various types of teaching interventions aiming to help student's alternative conception transformation. The purpose of this study was to compare the changes of conceptual understanding of Physics 11 (electricity and magnetism) laboratory in Computer simulated laboratory application (CSL) and Hands-on laboratory application (HLE) in the University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines (USTP), formerly Mindanao University of Science and Technology (MUST). In this study, a total of 194 students were randomly selected. Two parameters were set for this study: (1) gender of the respondent; and (2) college the respondents were enrolled. The result presented that CSL with 54% was the most preferred applications as alternative instructional tool in understanding the concepts of physics. Sparingly, about 46% of the surveyed respondents favored HLE. However, no apparent differences appeared with respect to the questions on the conceptual understanding learning objectives. Overall, there was no significant difference between CSL and HLE regardless of the gender ( p=0.81, p=0.90, and p=0.90)