Research Information System
International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology, İzmir, Turkey, 28 April - 01 May 2019, pp.1
Laboratories
are indispensible parts of science teaching. It is difficult to actualize
meaningful science learning without practical applications. Although hands-on
laboratories are commonly used in schools, virtual laboratories have entered to
schools with respect to the developments in educational technology. The main
goal of the current study is to investigate the effects of different laboratory
environments (hands-on and virtual laboratories) on pre-service science
teachers’ inquiry skills. Quasi-experimental research design was used in the
study. Participants of the study were 42 pre-service science teachers from a
public university. Twenty one of the participants were in the control group and
the other 21 ones were in the experimental group. Whereas the pre-service
science teachers did their investigations in hands-on laboratory, the ones in
the experimental group used virtual laboratories via the computers. The study
lasted for eight weeks. The inquiry skills test developed by Celik (2013) was
used as pretest and posttest. Due to the limited number of participant
nonparametric version of paired sample t-test, which is Wilcoxon-signed-rank
test and similarly, nonparametric version of independent samples t-test, which
is Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze the data. The findings revealed
that the pre-service science teachers from both groups developed their inquiry
skills significantly. Yet, there was no significant difference between the
control and the experimental groups. This finding shows that virtual
laboratories can be replaced by hands-on laboratories to enhance inquiry skills
of pre-service science teachers.