Point and Click or Grab and Heft: Comparing the Influence of Physical and Virtual Instructional Materials on Elementary School Students' Ability to Design Experiments

Abstract

The widespread availability of computers in elementary schools makes them an appealing option for presenting instructional materials in laboratory science. However, there are neither theoretical nor empirical grounds for predicting whether virtual or physical presentation of instructional materials will be more effective. The definition of "active manipulation" is poorly specified and there are few studies that directly compare the two approaches unaccompanied by other potential confounds. In this study, 4th-and 5th-grade children were taught how to design simple unconfounded experiments using 1 of 2 instructional methods differing only in whether children manipulated physical or virtual materials. The 2 types of materials were equally effective in achieving several instructional objectives, including the design of unconfounded experiments, the derivation of correct predictions from them, and explicit reference to the need for experiments to be unconfounded.

Hands on what? The relative effectiveness of physical versus virtual materials in an engineering design project by middle school children

“…The study extends the work of Triona and Klahr (2003) in several important ways. Triona and Klahr found that virtual and physical materials were equally effective in producing significant gains in children's ability to design unconfounded experiments and to learn about the properties of springs from those experiments.…”

“…Further discussion of this issue can be found in a study by Triona and Klahr (2003) and in Clements' (1999) review of physical versus computer manipulatives in early mathematics instruction. The study to be described in this paper examines the instructional effects of physical versus virtual materials while holding constant all other likely causal factors.…”

“…The results of these studies demonstrated the relative effectiveness of direct instruction over discovery learning when teaching the ''control of variables strategy'' (CVS), a domain-general procedure for designing unconfounded experiments. Triona and Klahr (2003) compared physical materials (springs and weights) and virtual materials (computer depictions of the same materials) in the context of direct instruction about CVS (contrasting Cells A and E). Their results indicated that physical and virtual instructional materials were equally effective in achieving several instructional objectives, including children's ability to design, justify, and derive correct predictions from unconfounded experiments.…”

“…First, the primary instructional objective for Triona and Klahr (2003) was for children to learn a domain-general procedure-the control of variables strategy (CVS), rather than about specific causal factors in the domains of ramps or springs. Although mastery of CVS would ultimately enable students to acquire such causal information, the main goal was to acquire the procedural and conceptual knowledge associated with CVS.…”

“…In summary, the goal of the present study is to look at a physical-virtual contrast in hands-on science instruction, but under several different conditions from the Triona and Klahr (2003) study, all of which were chosen so as to enrich our understanding of the conditions under which physical-virtual differences might emerge. Instead of direct instruction, we used a discovery context.…”