Using Inquiry-based Laboratory Activities in Lights and Optics Topic to Improve Students’ Conceptual Understanding

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of inquiry based laboratory activity by comparing the inquiry and non-inquiry laboratory activity in terms of students’ conceptual understanding among junior high school students in the topic of lights and optics. It also investigated the effectiveness of this method to male and female students. The method used in this research was quasi experiment which used two classes, where one class was randomly taken as the experimental class and the other one as the control class. Each class consists of 20 students. The result of this research shows that the average gain of the experimental class was 0.70, while the control one got 0.56. Means that the conceptual understanding of experimental class is statistically different with the control one. It is concluded that the inquiry based laboratory activity give better effect in improving students’ conceptual understanding and inquiry-based laboratory activities were found to have the same effectiveness for male and female students.