Newly Designed MBL Activities Perceived by Slovak and Czech Secondary School Teachers (A Comparative Study)
Abstract
Implementation of the microcomputer based laboratory (MBL) seems to be beneficial for students as well as teachers to learn (or teach) some phenomena and themes of science education. Despite its benefits, the implementation of MBL can suffer from some problems, for example (possible) technical problems or just some "technophobia", another issue can be lack of well-designed research based MBL materials.
To contribute to this field to support the implementation of MBL into schools, in the framework of European project COMBLAB, new inquiry-based MBL activities on chemistry, biology and physics were designed and developed and, the courses on MBL implementing the newly developed activities were held for Czech (26) and Slovak teachers (16). The opinions and attitudes of the participating teachers were collected through questionnaires evaluated.
The questionnaire research showed that all tested activities prepared in the framework of the COMBLAB project were evaluated very positively by the teachers and from their point of view, the activities are well applicable in their lessons. The objectives are defined adequately, instructions are clear and activities have logical structure.
Difficulty, duration of the majority of the activities and contents (with respect to school curriculum) are appropriate, nevertheless, in some cases, there was statistically significant differences among the activities. Therefore, in some cases, some changes were made to make the activities shorter and less difficult.
Czech and Slovak teachers evaluated the activities very similarly and the results showed no statistically significant difference between Czech and Slovak teachers.