Indonesia and many other developing countries have a vast youth population, yet limited facilities for physics learning. The major purposes of this study are to develop low-cost, technology-enhanced physical and virtual laboratories and to investigate their effects on various learning objectives, including conceptual understanding, inquiry performance, scientific inquiry self-efficacy, and enjoyment. The virtual laboratory (VL) used the physics education technology to simulate a pendulum, while the physical laboratory (PL) was a technology-enhanced physical laboratory utilizing the Camera Stopwatch and Smart Tools applications. In this quasiexperimental design, a total of 68 secondary school students in Indonesia were randomly assigned to the PL and VL settings. The participants conducted the pendulum experiment guided by an inquiry worksheet along with pre-and postconceptual tests, scientific inquiry self-efficacy, and enjoyment questionnaires. The result revealed that the guided inquiry-based VL was as effective as the PL for simple concepts, but was more effective for improving difficult concepts and scientific inquiry selfefficacy. Nevertheless, the PL group performed better on crucial inquiry activities, that is, planning, experimenting, and further improvement of the experiment. Moreover, both the PL and VL significantly promoted enjoyment. It was concluded that the PL and VL were successful for achieving different learning objectives.
This study investigated the time effect of cooperative games on students' emotions of learning science and the treatment effect on their chemistry achievement. This quasi-experimental study compared the use of cards, board games, and riddles, and the use of conventional paper-and-pencil exercises to learn the basics of chemical elements and compounds, for a duration of 4 weeks. One hundred and fourteen ninth graders at an urban public high school in Taipei were involved. The results revealed that the experimental group had significantly higher positive emotion and lower negative emotion throughout the intervention period. While no time effect was observed for the experimental group, a significant time effect on positive and negative emotions in the comparison group using exercises was found: high achievers decreased their positive emotion, and middle to high achievers increased their negative emotion. Furthermore, low and middle achievers performed better when using games. However, no significant difference for the high achievers of the two groups was discovered. This study showed that conventional exercises were detrimental to middle and high achievers' learning emotions, although their concepts improved. Science teachers may try innovative activities such as collaborative games to maintain students' positive emotions and facilitate low achievers' conceptual learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.