Comparing the Impact of Dynamic and Static Media on Students' Learning of One-Dimensional Kinematics

Abstract

Many physics curricula are opened with the study of kinematics, because such practice is considered to be a logically grounded way for introducing the students with fundamental concepts and methods of pyhsics. Consequently, the approach to teaching kinematics significantly influences not only the students' knowledge of kinematics, but also their learning of other areas of physics, as well as their attitudes towards physics instruction, in general. It is theoretically supposed that understanding of kinematics can be fostered by providing the students with external visualizations, as well as with the opportunity to take measurements of physical quantities. In our study, we aimed to compare the impact of simulations, sequences of simulation frames and conventional static diagrams on students' learning performance in one-dimensional kinematics. Our student sample consisted of three classes of middle years students (N=63 ; mostly 15 year olds). Each of these classes has been assigned to one of the experimental treatments, whereby the treatment variable reflected the use of the abovementioned media types. In order to answer our research question, we conducted a pre- post quasi- experiment with three comparison groups. The results of the ANCOVA showed that students who learned from simulations or from printed sequences of simulation frames significantly outperformed their peers who learned one-dimensional kinematics from conventional static diagrams. Thereby, the results of our study indicate that learning from sequences of simulation frames seems to be particularly productive for girls. Finally, the data from our attitude survey suggest that students are very motivated for learning from simulations or sequences of simulation frames and they consider them as a very useful tool that considerably helped them to learn the difficult kinematical concepts.