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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 12, Issue 1, Article 6
(Jun., 2011) |
Effectiveness of hands-on and minds-on activities on students’ achievement and attitudes towards physics*
Özlem ATEŞ1 and Ali ERYILMAZ2
1Celal Bayar University, Faculty of Education, Demirci, Manisa, TURKEY2Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Education, Odtü, Ankara, TURKEY
1Correspondence author E-mail: hozlem@gmail.com
Received 4 April, 2011
Revised 1 July, 2011
This research aimed to investigate the effectiveness of hands-on and minds-on activities on ninth grade students’ achievement in and attitudes towards simple electric circuits. The study was conducted with 130 students, 70 of which were assigned as experimental group and instructed by hands-on/minds-on activities, while the 60 were assigned as control group and instructed by the traditional method. For the study, three measuring tools were used; the Physics Achievement Test, Physics Attitude Scale, and observation checklist. When the data were analyzed by using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), the results indicated that there was a significant difference between the means of the students’ physics achievement in favor of the experimental group. However, the analyses failed to show any significant differences between the means of the students’ attitudes towards simple electric circuits. The results of this study are important especially for developing countries that can not use expensive materials to make students physically active.
Keywords: Hands-on activities, minds-on activities, physics achievement, physics attitude, physics education
*This paper is mainly based on the master's thesis of the first author and presented in V. National Science and Mathematics Education Congress. Ankara, Turkey: Middle East Technical University.
