Abstract
Although lab activities play an important role in physics teaching, many of these activities do not attain the expected objectives. Many reasons can be advanced for this, such as a lack of apparatus/equipment in schools, limits to the lab time allocated, teachers' lack of knowledge and skills about lab-oriented teaching methods or the teachers' lack of self-confidence having a negative effect on lab teaching. All these reasons increase the risk that lab activities will not achieve their objectives. This study was conducted to determine how well pre-service physics teachers recognized and understood the functions of various apparatuses and pieces of equipment used in mechanics and electricity and magnetism labs. The survey method was used to measure the pre-service physics teachers' levels of recognition (n=118). The Physics Lab Apparatuses Recognition Test (PLART), consisting of four stages for each item, was developed as a data collection tool. The results of the present study indicate that pre-service physics teachers did not recognize or understand the functions of the majority of apparatuses frequently used in mechanics and electricity and magnetism experiments.
Highlights
Lab activities are an important component of physics
Considered from a didactic point of view, lab applications can be regarded as a teaching strategy for understanding the structure, laws, models and concepts of physics [2]
Level 3 consists of the pre-service teachers who knew the names and functions of the pieces of apparatus
Summary
The AAPT [1] has shaped the learning outcomes of university-level lab curriculum, focusing on the areas of constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, developing technical and practical lab skills, analyzing and visualizing data and communicating physics. These areas have a rather broad focus in terms of the knowledge, skills and attitudes required. The effects of lab applications on the learning process have provoked much thought and research [3,4] Another engaging topic is what kind of lab applications are best for targeted learning outcomes. Various different lab applications have been described and investigated in various ways [5, 6, 7, 8]
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