The focus of the present work was on 10- to 12-year-old elementary school students’ conceptual
learning outcomes in science in two specific inquiry-learning environments, laboratory
and simulation. The main aim was to examine if it would be more beneficial to combine
than contrast simulation and laboratory activities in science teaching. It was argued
that the status quo where laboratories and simulations are seen as alternative or competing
methods in science teaching is hardly an optimal solution to promote students’ learning and
understanding in various science domains. It was hypothesized that it would make more
sense and be more productive to combine laboratories and simulations. Several explanations
and examples were provided to back up the hypothesis.
In order to test whether learning with the combination of laboratory and simulation
activities can result in better conceptual understanding in science than learning with laboratory
or simulation activities alone, two experiments were conducted in the domain of
electricity. In these experiments students constructed and studied electrical circuits in three
different learning environments: laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits), and
simulation-laboratory combination (real and virtual circuits were used simultaneously). In
order to measure and compare how these environments affected students’ conceptual understanding of circuits, a subject knowledge assessment questionnaire was administered
before and after the experimentation. The results of the experiments were presented in four
empirical studies. Three of the studies focused on learning outcomes between the conditions
and one on learning processes.
Study I analyzed learning outcomes from experiment I. The aim of the study was to
investigate if it would be more beneficial to combine simulation and laboratory activities
than to use them separately in teaching the concepts of simple electricity. Matched-trios
were created based on the pre-test results of 66 elementary school students and divided
randomly into a laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits) and simulation-laboratory
combination (real and virtual circuits simultaneously) conditions. In each condition
students had 90 minutes to construct and study various circuits. The results showed that
studying electrical circuits in the simulation–laboratory combination environment improved
students’ conceptual understanding more than studying circuits in simulation and laboratory
environments alone. Although there were no statistical differences between simulation
and laboratory environments, the learning effect was more pronounced in the simulation
condition where the students made clear progress during the intervention, whereas in the
laboratory condition students’ conceptual understanding remained at an elementary level
after the intervention.
Study II analyzed learning outcomes from experiment II. The aim of the study was to
investigate if and how learning outcomes in simulation and simulation-laboratory combination
environments are mediated by implicit (only procedural guidance) and explicit (more
structure and guidance for the discovery process) instruction in the context of simple DC
circuits. Matched-quartets were created based on the pre-test results of 50 elementary school
students and divided randomly into a simulation implicit (SI), simulation explicit (SE), combination implicit (CI) and combination explicit (CE) conditions. The results showed that
when the students were working with the simulation alone, they were able to gain significantly greater amount of subject knowledge when they received metacognitive support
(explicit instruction; SE) for the discovery process than when they received only procedural
guidance (implicit instruction: SI). However, this additional scaffolding was not enough to
reach the level of the students in the combination environment (CI and CE). A surprising
finding in Study II was that instructional support had a different effect in the combination
environment than in the simulation environment. In the combination environment explicit
instruction (CE) did not seem to elicit much additional gain for students’ understanding of
electric circuits compared to implicit instruction (CI). Instead, explicit instruction slowed
down the inquiry process substantially in the combination environment.
Study III analyzed from video data learning processes of those 50 students that participated
in experiment II (cf. Study II above). The focus was on three specific learning
processes: cognitive conflicts, self-explanations, and analogical encodings. The aim of the
study was to find out possible explanations for the success of the combination condition in
Experiments I and II. The video data provided clear evidence about the benefits of studying
with the real and virtual circuits simultaneously (the combination conditions). Mostly
the representations complemented each other, that is, one representation helped students to
interpret and understand the outcomes they received from the other representation. However,
there were also instances in which analogical encoding took place, that is, situations in
which the slightly discrepant results between the representations ‘forced’ students to focus
on those features that could be generalised across the two representations. No statistical differences were found in the amount of experienced cognitive conflicts and self-explanations
between simulation and combination conditions, though in self-explanations there was a
nascent trend in favour of the combination. There was also a clear tendency suggesting that
explicit guidance increased the amount of self-explanations. Overall, the amount of cognitive
conflicts and self-explanations was very low.
The aim of the Study IV was twofold: the main aim was to provide an aggregated overview
of the learning outcomes of experiments I and II; the secondary aim was to explore
the relationship between the learning environments and students’ prior domain knowledge
(low and high) in the experiments. Aggregated results of experiments I & II showed that
on average, 91% of the students in the combination environment scored above the average
of the laboratory environment, and 76% of them scored also above the average of the
simulation environment. Seventy percent of the students in the simulation environment
scored above the average of the laboratory environment. The results further showed that
overall students seemed to benefit from combining simulations and laboratories regardless
of their level of prior knowledge, that is, students with either low or high prior knowledge
who studied circuits in the combination environment outperformed their counterparts who
studied in the laboratory or simulation environment alone. The effect seemed to be slightly
bigger among the students with low prior knowledge. However, more detailed inspection
of the results showed that there were considerable differences between the experiments regarding how students with low and high prior knowledge benefitted from the combination:
in Experiment I, especially students with low prior knowledge benefitted from the combination
as compared to those students that used only the simulation, whereas in Experiment
II, only students with high prior knowledge seemed to benefit from the combination relative
to the simulation group. Regarding the differences between simulation and laboratory
groups, the benefits of using a simulation seemed to be slightly higher among students with
high prior knowledge.
The results of the four empirical studies support the hypothesis concerning the benefits
of using simulation along with laboratory activities to promote students’ conceptual understanding of electricity. It can be concluded that when teaching students about electricity, the students can gain better understanding when they have an opportunity to use the simulation
and the real circuits in parallel than if they have only the real circuits or only a computer
simulation available, even when the use of the simulation is supported with the explicit
instruction. The outcomes of the empirical studies can be considered as the first unambiguous
evidence on the (additional) benefits of combining laboratory and simulation activities
in science education as compared to learning with laboratories and simulations alone.Siirretty Doriast
