Looking for Parameters of Students-Lecturer Interaction that Influence how Students Perceive Physics Demonstrations
Abstrakt
Experiment is a key element not only for physics as science, but also for physics education. Even though research attention has been lately focused more on students' hands-on experiments in inquiry-based science education, demonstration experiments still play an important role in today's education.
Department of Physics Education (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics) has been performing physics demonstrations for secondary education students for more than 30 years. Seven different topics are currently offered by the Department.
A survey conducted in years 2017/18 on a population of est. 5,100 students showed that the students' perception varies quite significantly, depending on specific topic, especially considering their intrinsic motivation and subjectively perceived value and usefulness of a given topic. The questions at hand are whether parameters that influence students' perception in negative or positive way do exist and how they are related to the choice of the experiments themselves or the lecturer's work with the audience.
The study presented in our contribution focuses on the last of these aspects, i.e. the role of audience-lecturer interaction in students' perception of physics demonstrations. We present a category-based video study conducted on video recordings of all seven aforementioned topics of physics demonstrations, its results and interpretation.
Our results show that lecturer's approach to interaction with students and usage of AV technology strongly varies topic by topic; the possible link between this diversity on one hand and the diverse students' perception of particular topics on the other hand will be inspected in a follow-up research.