Effectiveness of hands-on and minds-on activities on students’ achievement and attitudes towards physics

A public high school was chosen for its convenience for the researcher from the schools in Ankara, Turkey. Within 11 ninth grade classes of this school, four classes of two teachers, consisting of 130 ninth grade students were involved in this study. One of the physics teachers volunteered to use the suggested hands-on activities in her physics classes. Therefore, her two classes with 70 students were assigned as experimental group and instructed by hands-on/minds-on activities, while the two classes of the other teacher with 60 students were assigned as control group and instructed by traditional method.

Three measuring tools were used in the study: Physics Achievement Test (PACT), and Physics Attitude Scale (PATS) about simple electric circuits and an observation checklist.

Physics Achievement Test (PACT): The purpose of the PACT was to assess students’ achievement in simple electric circuits. This test consists of 25 questions and covers the physics contents taught in ninth grade curriculum (old one that had been implemented before 2008) about simple electric circuits: circuit elements, electric current, electric resistance, electric potential, voltage source, Ohm’s law, series circuits, parallel circuits, compound circuits and short circuit. Before developing this test, a list of learning objectives for simple electric circuits was prepared. Then, questions prepared by the previous researchers (Chambers & Andre, 1997; Heller & Finley, 1992; Sencar, 2001) were investigated and physics books and Turkish University Entrance Exam questions were examined. From the pool of the questions, the researcher chose more than 30 questions by taking the list of learning objectives into consideration. After that, a table of test specification was prepared in which the objectives and questions were categorized according to the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Some questions were discarded by taking the table of test specification into consideration, and the researcher prepared 13 questions by this way. Moreover, 12 multiple choice questions were taken from the study of Sencar (2001) which were prepared in order to assess the students’ misconceptions about simple electric circuits. Figure 1 shows a misconception question and Figure 2 shows a multiple choice question from the PACT.

The test was administered to 349 ninth grade high school students as a pilot study. As a result of item analysis, four questions were completely discarded and 21 items were left in the PACT. Three of these items were true-false type, three were matching type and the rest of the items were multiple-choice type. For content validity, the test was checked by an instructor, three research assistants, and two preservice teachers from Middle East Technical University, Secondary Science and Mathematics Education Department in major of Physics Education. The internal reliability of the test was calculated by using Cronbach Alpha and the coefficient was obtained as 0.74. Possible PACT scores ranged from 0 to 21, with higher scores indicating higher achievement in simple electric circuits.

Physics Attitude Scale (PATS): Developed by Taşlıdere (2002), the PATS with 24 items were used to determine students’ attitudes towards simple electric circuits. The items were designed to be rated on a 5-point Likert type response format (absolutely disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, absolutely agree). The scale covered five subcategories: enjoyment, importance of physics, interest related behavior, achievement-motivation, and self-efficacy. Examples of an item for each subcategory are given in Table 1. The internal reliability of the scale for each subcategory was calculated by using Cronbach Alpha as 0.86, 0.84, 0.80, 0.87, 0.87 respectively and 0.93 for overall scale. Possible PATS scores ranged from 24 to 120, with higher scores indicating positive attitudes towards simple electric circuits.

Subcategory	Item
Enjoyment	I enjoy studying subjects related with simple electric circuits.
Self-Efficacy	I am sure that I can be successful about simple electric circuits.
Importance of Physics	I believe that simple electric circuits will help me in my future studies.
Achievement-Motivation	I do my level best for being successful about simple electric circuits.
Interest Related Behavior	I enjoy talking with my friends about simple electric circuits.

Observation Checklist: The observation checklist (see Appendix I) was developed for treatment verification. The first 10 items show how frequently some actions were done during the lessons. Items 8 and 9 are negative items for the hands-on activity criteria. Item 11 indicates whether the activities are done alone, in pairs or in groups of three and the last item shows how much time the students spent on doing hands-on activities in a class hour. All the items include “no activity” choice in order to detect whether the control group performed any activity or not. During the study, all the lessons of the experimental and control groups were observed by the researcher. However, four of 14 observations were done by two observers. The inter-rater reliability coefficient value was 0.91 for the observations of control group and 0.87 for that of experimental group, which indicated high consistency through scorers.

Various tables and materials were developed and used in this study: a list of learning objectives, a table of test specification, hands-on/minds-on activities, an objective-activity table, a criteria-activity table, a misconception-activity table, and a handout. While preparing activities, the list of learning objectives, activity criteria and misconceptions of the students about simple electric circuits were taken into consideration. Therefore, nine hands-on activities including minds-on experiences were developed to engage students actively in simple electric circuits by making use of a wide range of sources (Cunningham & Herr, 1994; Laws, 1997; McDermott, 1996). The titles of the activities were; a simple electric circuit, a circuit with switch, measuring electric current, measuring electric potential, Ohm’s law, factors affecting resistors, series connected circuits, parallel connected circuits, and short circuit. All the activities were done with simple materials such as: bulbs, bulb sockets, batteries, switches, connection wires, ammeters, and voltmeters. As a sample of an activity, “a simple electric circuit” activity is given in Appendix II.

In order to examine how the objectives match with the activities, objective-activity table was prepared. Next, both activity criteria (activity sheet attract students’ interests with its format, activity have clear directions and illustrations etc.) and hands-on/minds-on activity criteria (students are both physically and mentally engaged in activity, activity contains easy to obtain materials etc.) were developed. Then, criteria-activity table was prepared to make sure that every activity has these criteria. Finally, misconception-activity table was prepared. This table helped us to show that all the misconceptions about simple electric circuits specified in literature were aimed to be eliminated by the hands-on/minds-on activities. As a result, the activities were revised with the help of those tables. Moreover, one page handout was prepared to give some of the necessary definitions, symbolic representations and units of the circuit elements. This handout was delivered to the experimental group students as well as the control group students.

A quasi-experimental study design was used in this study since it was not possible to randomly assign subjects to both the experimental and control groups. Two weeks before the study, the activity sheets, sets of materials, and all equipments were provided to the teacher who volunteered to implement hands-on activities. It took two hours to introduce the students’ role, the teachers’ role, the hands-on activity sheets, and their implementation process to the teacher.

The teachers administered the PACT and PATS to both groups as pretests one week before the treatment started. All pretests of the control and experimental groups were administered on the same day. Within 130 ninth grade students, 70 students were assigned as experimental group and instructed with hands-on and minds-on activities, while the 60 were assigned as control group and instructed by the traditional method. In this study, traditional method is defined as conventional lecturing method supplemented by textbook where teacher has the primary role in delivering the content and students are mainly taught accompanied by reading, assignment, note taking, and a few demonstrations. On the other hand, hands-on instruction is defined as devoting minimum time to lecturing and maximum time to hands-on and minds-on activities through discovery method.

During the treatment period, the topics related to simple electric circuits were covered as part of the regular curriculum in the physics course. Students in both groups were exposed to the same content for the same length of time. The duration of the lessons was two 40-minute sessions per week. Throughout the study, the researcher observed the control and experimental classes for the verification of the treatment. The students in the control group were generally taught with the note taking strategy. The teacher explained important concepts and solved problems related to these concepts. The students wrote down the teacher’s explanations and from time to time, they asked questions about unclear points during the instruction. The instruction via lecture was not accompanied with demonstrations, lab-based experiments or any activities. Therefore, for the control group, the observations verified the absence of hands-on activities.

In the experimental group, each student was given related activity sheet and necessary materials. Students followed the procedure and answered the questions given in the activity sheets. The teacher helped the students when they had difficulty to connect the circuits. She never told what is expected to be found during activities. The students performed some of the activities individually, some in pairs. They completed all parts of the activities including their predictions, measurements, and comments. After completing each activity, they discussed their results with each other and the teacher. Therefore, the observations showed that the students were actively engaged in hands-on/minds-on activities and discovered both facts and concepts individually or independently while the teacher mostly acted as a guide and gave little direct instruction to summarize the results at the end of some activities.

Finally, after three weeks of the treatment period, the PACT and PATS were administered as posttests to the control and experimental groups again. All the data gathered were analyzed by the computer.