Assessing Differences between Three Virtual General Chemistry Experiments and Similar Hands-On Experiments

Abstract

To date, the efficacy of virtual experiments is not well-understood. To better understand what differences may exist between a hands-on learning environment and a virtual learning environment, three experiments were chosen for investigation. For each experiment, approximately half of the students completed a hands-on version of the experiment, and the other half completed a virtual version. After completing the given experiment, students were compared on the following: their ability to meet the learning objectives for that experiment, their responses to six affective scales, and their grade on a laboratory report. Differences were found for four learning objectives. Two of these learning objectives were on the Beer’s law experiment and the other two were on the titration experiment whereas the calorimetry experiment had no differences between groups on learning objectives. However, all four differences are likely due to differences in procedures between environments and not due to the environment itself. Additionally, differences were found on two of the affective scales (usefulness of lab and equipment usability) across all three experiments indicating that the students who completed a virtual experiment found the experiment to be less useful and the virtual environment harder to use. Students that completed the virtual version of the titration experiment also reported that the experiment took less time as indicated by the difference in the open-endedness of the lab scale. These differences are not representative of a students’ individual experience, however. To capture individual experiences, latent profile analysis was conducted to determine what affective profiles existed within the population. There were three common profiles identified across the three experiments: low affective outcomes, medium affective outcomes, and high affective outcomes. These indicate that while a majority of the students have medium or high affective outcomes and do well on laboratory reports, there are anywhere from 4% to 17% of the students completing a given experiment that have low affective outcomes but still do equally well on the laboratory report as compared to the other students. Future work should be conducted to assess why students report low affective outcomes and if a different type of laboratory learning environment or curriculum type would better serve them.

Triage and Recovery of STEM Laboratory Skills

“…Over the last decade, there have been suggestions that online lab experiences would be a useful way to save costs (22). Our analysis shows that online labs come up short of developing many proficiencies extracted from AAAS, ACS, and ASM guidelines.…”

“…Putting students back in hands-on laboratory settings will allow us to arouse their latent interests in STEM. When contrasting in-person and online labs, recent studies have shown a significant difference in intellectual accessibility, emotional satisfaction, and anxiety, all of which are better satisfied by in-person labs ( 20 , 21 ). As described above, virtual laboratories do not adequately prepare our students for upper-level science courses, and more concerning, virtual labs do not prepare this generation of students to become STEM professionals.…”

Community College Chemistry Instruction and Research in the Time of COVID-19

“…Two recent articles by Barbera et al noted no difference in cognitive domain performance between online and face-to-face laboratory students, but found that traditional in-person laboratories were better in the affective domain (intellectual accessibility, emotional satisfaction, and anxiety) . Naturally, they did not study psychomotor domain effects.…”

VR in chemistry, a review of scientific research on advanced atomic/molecular visualization

“…There is no consensus on the interpretation of learning outcomes with VL, and some works state that there are no significant differences between VRL and real labs (Dunnagan et al, 2019). Accordingly, even though the students taking part in the virtual experiments can complete the activity in less time, this type of process seems less useful and more difficult to implement than the real and actual physical experiment (Hensen et al, 2020), and these digital tasks reduce tactile and olfactory sensation.…”