Experiments in different forms can certainly be suitable tools for increasing student interest in physics. However, educators continuously discuss which forms of experimenting (if any) are the most beneficial for these purposes. At the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, two different forms of physics experiments are offered to upper secondary students: hands-on experimental work in the InteractivePhysics Laboratory, and physics demonstration shows where the students watch experiments conducted by a lecturer. Our research focuses primarily on student feedback about their immediate attitudes towards these two projects. Data collection was undertaken using questionnaire research based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory. This research was subsequently supplemented with a qualitative study examining the influenceof students’ experimental work in the Interactive Physics Laboratory on their understanding of selected physics concepts. The results of the main research show that the two projects do not exhibit significant differencesin terms of student interest and perceived usefulness; nevertheless, students felt the need for significantly more effort and experienced pressure during their work in the Interactive Physics Laboratory. One interestingfinding, which goes against our original hypothesis, is that grades in physics are quite a strong predictor of students’ assessment of the projects: better grades indicate more positive assessment of both projects as well as less pressure felt during hands-on activities in the laboratory.
Comparative studies on science curricula provide insights into educational standards worldwide. Accordingly, in this study, we analysed the intended curricula of mathematics and science subjects of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Slovenia by comparing their lower secondary (ISCED 2) National Curriculum Documents on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography and geology from the perspective of learning outcomes. By document analysis, we extracted obligatory learning outcomes from the national curricula, assessing their level of detail and structure. A team of seven coders also measured cognitive demands of the learning outcomes using the revised Bloom's taxonomy. Our results showed considerable differences in the number of learning outcomes across countries and in the structure of these outcomes across subjects, even within national documents. Cognitive demands determined by learning outcomes were similar across the countries, but metacognitive knowledge and cognitive processes of higher level (Evaluate and Create) were mostly overlooked. We also found a lack of learning outcomes explicitly requiring the use of ICT, experimental or field work or data analysis. Although these requirements are usually formulated in general sections of curriculum documents, we recommend explicitly incorporating them into these documents as individual learning outcomes.
Ten years ago we started to develop a Collection of Fully Solved Problems aimed at introductory undergraduate and high school level students. The collection is specially designed to encourage students in an active approach to problem solving, e.g. to solve at least some parts of a problem on their own. Nowadays the Collection contains about 800 fully solved problems in physics in Czech and nearly 180 problems in English. It has several hundreds of unique visitors per school day. Based on user feedback, the collection is used by students mainly for their home study and by teachers as a supplementary material. The creation of the structured solution of the physics problems has proved to be a beneficial activity for prospective physics teachers (students of our department).
Experiments in different forms can be suitable tools how to increase students’ interest in physics. However, educators discuss which ways of experimenting are the most beneficial for these purposes. At our department, two different forms of physics experiments are offered to upper secondary students – students’ hands-on experimental work and physics demonstration shows where the students watch experiments conducted by a lecturer. Our research aims primarily at students’ feedback about their immediate attitudes towards the hands-on experimenting and differences in perception of this experimenting and watching the lecture demonstrations. For collecting data we used a questionnaire based on Intrinsic Motivation Inventory.
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