Pupils' attitudes and opinions on implementation and work with MBL systems and IBSE oriented activities
Abstract
The Microcomputer-Based Laboratory (MBL) is a kind of reflection of huge and growing employment of sensors in "common" life, industry and science. Hence, MBL should be implemented into school education and practice and any support of the implementation can be considered as meaningful.
With respect to that, the contribution is focused on selected results of a questionnaire research following opinions and attitudes of students to work in MBL in courses using inquiry based (IBSE) oriented activities. As well as, attitudes on implementation of MBL into secondary school practice, quality of the course and used MBL systems were also evaluated. 240 students from 9 Czech secondary schools participated in the survey.
The teachers from the mentioned secondary schools were also interviewed with respect to their opinions on implementation of MBL into secondary school education. The results showed that majority of students support implementation of MBL into secondary school practice despite some problems which can accompany work with MBL systems.
They evaluated all the curses and used systems positively although to use tablet with SPARKvue application to enter the data manually was found to be less practical. The MBL course can be complicated also with high amount of teacher's help needed by students.
The technical help (accompanying the work with the MBL systems) can be over 50 %. This leads to higher workload of teacher during the course and its preparation, and, it can be considered as one of the identified obstacles in implementation of MBL into secondary school education.
As a consequence, some technical on-site support of teachers is suggested in first phases of implementation of MBL at individual schools.