Methods and techniques in experimental determination of laboratory activities' education impact: the physics laboratory activities in universities courses

From the point of view of the educational impact on university students, four different ways of carrying out physics experiments are compared. The didactical tools suitable for simulating, by means of an e-learning platform, the inquiry-based and the recipe-based laboratory activities are constructed and described. The tests are constructed, and validated by means of Item Response Theory and Factor Analysis techniques: - for building the necessary statistical samples, - for determining the educational impact of the four different didactical paths. The statistical techniques adopted for evaluating the educational impact of the different didactical paths are described in their theoretical details, also providing, for each one, an explicit example of use. The HTML-JavaScript algorithms needed to simulate the experiments in e- learning modality are described in detail. Furthermore, a computer tool is proposed that can help the teacher to produce simulations of thermodynamic systems subjected to thermal and adiabatic interactions. The results of the statistical experiment are given as a functions of the statistical variables proficiency, awareness of knowledge acquired. The statistical experiment confirms that: - the inquiry-based didactic paths, especially if realized in the e-learning modality, reach the maximum educational impact from the point of view of the knowledge of the topics, - the didactic paths carried out in the laboratory, especially for the inquiry- based experiments, reach the maximum educational impact from the point of view of the awareness of the acquired knowledge. Finally, our study confirms recent finding in the literature, i.e., that when the didactic path is carried out in inquiry mode, the students can construct robust and original knowledge of the proposed subject as an evidence of the students’ acquired agency.