Lab courses for prospective physics teachers: what could we learn from the first COVID-19 lockdown?

Abstract

At the universities of Dresden, Vienna, and Zagreb, a laboratory course for prospective physics teachers was transferred to an online environment because of the lockdown in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper is to present and compare students’ and instructors’ considerations about the experiences with this laboratory course at these three universities and to formulate guidelines for organizing lab courses for prospective physics teachers. The research was conducted in three steps: first, interviews were conducted with prospective physics teachers (N = 10); second, an online questionnaire was administered to course participants (N = 99); and third, lab course instructors completed an online questionnaire (N = 8). The results show that an increase in creativity and confidence was expressed when conducting home experiments. Students who received support and guidance benefited more from the online lab course, but some students also experienced a greater time commitment. On a positive note, all participants thought outside-the-box during this lab experience and found solutions that led to new ways of conducting labs. Our study suggests that in future online or regular lab courses, students should have the chance to make decisions about experiments and be creative, with an emphasis on peer discussions and support from instructors.

Finnish university physics teachers’ experiences of transferring to online teaching due to COVID-19 pandemic

“…Because experimental working has been either forbidden or limited during the pandemic, it has been expectedly stated to be a great challenge also in previous research (O’Brien 2021 ; Romadhon et al 2021 ; Nuere and de Miguel 2020 ). We should point it out that Ametepe and Khan ( 2021 ) and Jelicic et al ( 2022 ) have given research-based recommendations for functional online and hybrid laboratory courses, which gives a more positive outlook for the issue. Our finding concerning well-being of the teachers is supported by Klapproth et al ( 2020 ) who have reported that teachers from various school levels have experienced medium to high levels of stress during the pandemic.…”

“…They are related to overburdening the students, lack of technology or familiarity with technology, lack of knowledge of instructional design, and concern about students cheating (e.g., Lemay et al 2020 ; Trust and Whalen 2021 ). Experimental working has been difficult to implement during the pandemic, but it has been substituted with online laboratories, simulations, and homemade experiments, also in the field of physics (Jelicic et al 2022 ; Lemay et al 2020 ; O’Brien 2021 ; Romadhon et al 2021 ).…”

Derivation of Newton's law of cooling and heating: Heating the water then cooling it down naturally to the room temperature

“…Many activities or occurrences around us can be used as learning tools in science education (Abdullah et al, 2014;Abdullah et al, 2020;Aleksandrov et al, 2013;Aslani & Moghiman, 2019;Fallahnezhad & Reza Nazif, 2019;Nelson et al, 2020;Wibowo et al, 2016;Will et al, 2017). Contextual approaches need to be involved instead of textual practices in conducting science learning to become more understandable and fun, especially in physics subject (Dale et al, 2019;Jelicic et al, 2022;Sokolowski, 2021). Through contextual approaches, the learning content that students are studying will look more accurate and easily imagined.…”