Abstract
In this paper, we investigate an approach to supporting students’ learning in science through a combination of physical experimentation and virtual modeling. We present a study that utilizes a scientific inquiry framework, which we call “bifocal modeling,” to link student-designed experiments and computer models in real time. In this study, a group of high school students designed computer models of bacterial growth with reference to a simultaneous physical experiment they were conducting, and were able to validate the correctness of their model against the results of their experiment. Our findings suggest that as the students compared their virtual models with physical experiments, they encountered “discrepant events” that contradicted their existing conceptions and elicited a state of cognitive disequilibrium. This experience of conflict encouraged students to further examine their ideas and to seek more accurate explanations of the observed natural phenomena, improving the design of their computer models.
Highlights
The nature and role of school science laboratories have been subject to widespread controversy in the research community (NRC 1996), especially regarding the benefits of physical, virtual, and combined laboratories (Olympiou and Zacharia 2012; Triona and Klahr 2003; Zacharia 2007)
In this paper, we investigate an approach to supporting students’ learning in science through a combination of physical experimentation and virtual modeling
The rise of computer models and simulations in the research of highly complex scientific phenomena is a revolutionary development that has affected all of the sciences, and increasingly scientific experiments are being undertaken with simulation tools
Summary
The nature and role of school science laboratories have been subject to widespread controversy in the research community (NRC 1996), especially regarding the benefits of physical, virtual, and combined laboratories (Olympiou and Zacharia 2012; Triona and Klahr 2003; Zacharia 2007). Zacharia and Constantinou (2008) recreated this result with undergraduate physics students by first employing a physical model rather than a virtual one, and Jaakkola and Nurmi (2008) obtained similar results for elementary school students. Most of these early studies pointed to the advantage of virtual over physical laboratories, but soon researchers found that the combination of the physical and
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