Interactive hands-on laboratory for upper secondary students: What do the visitors appreciate?

Abstract

As the covid-19 pandemic wanes, events that take place outside of school are regaining popularity. One such event is a visit to the Interactive Physics Laboratory (IPL). The main goal of the IPL is to provide upper secondary student groups with the necessary space, equipment, and guidance for hands-on practical work in the form of structured inquiry. Since the spring of 2022, we have been requesting feedback from our student visitors through a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. The most crucial and sole research question addressed in this paper is: “What do students appreciate the most during their visit to the IPL?” To answer this question, we have employed a mixed methods research design, combining the ideological background of grounded theory with the utilization of statistical tools. In this contribution, we provide the results obtained from analysing answers from 250 student respondents. We present an inductively derived system of codes, categories, and coding rules obtained through open coding of the student responses. Additionally, we share elementary statistical findings regarding the frequency of occurrence of particular codes. This study serves as a pilot of the coding system that we plan to apply to a larger sample of respondents in the future.