Input from Current High School Science Teachers
In addition to conducting a literature review, I interviewed several current high school science teachers across multiple concentrations in order to get their perspectives on and experiences with using virtual labs in their classrooms. I believe that experience-based results are just as important as research-based results, and it is a good thing I pursued this method of research! As you will find, the teachers' perspectives add crucial information to the conclusions from my literature review.
Biology
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Earth/Environmental
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Katie Monroe has been teaching Biology at Durham School of the Arts (DSA) in Durham, NC for 14 years. Her classes have been a heterogeneous mix of standard and honors students. She defines a virtual lab as "any online activity, demo, or lab that provides a learning experience for a student." She has incorporated a virtual lab at one point or another for every unit she has taught, but she truly feels that students don't learn as much from them as they do from traditional hands-on labs. She says, "They can be good tools for review, but if an actual hands-on lab is possible, that's going to be a more interesting and powerful experience for the students."
Holly Byers is entering her first year of teaching at Riverside HS in Durham, NC and will be teaching standard Biology and honors Earth Science. Holly did her teaching internships at Riverside HS with Mika and at DSA with Katie. She defines a virtual lab as an internet resource that walks students through a procedure for a lab and requires minimal direction from the teacher. She thinks that virtual labs are great when the resources aren't available to do the real lab in the classroom, but they generally don't provide the students with as memorable of an experience. One problem she has noticed is that some virtual labs aren't made very well, which can be confusing for students and leads to more troubleshooting than learning of the intended concepts. She sees herself using virtual labs only to prepare her students for hands-on labs because she thinks they are less genuine and don't give students as valuable of an experience as traditional labs do. Physics
Alice Griffeth is entering her first year of teaching at Jordan HS in Durham, NC this fall. She completed teaching internships at both Jordan HS teaching all levels of Physics and standard Physical Science and Riverside HS teaching ESL and standard Biology with Mika. Alice defines a virtual lab as a lab in which students are limited in the amount of control they have over the experiment and both participate in and manipulate real data. Alice highly recommends using the PHET simulations (see the "Labs and Resources" section), especially in Physics and Physical Science classes. She likes that students can work with real data and that things work the way they're supposed to, allowing students to focus on the concepts they should be learning. She also thinks that if you can find a way to incorporate some minor coding or programming into these labs they could be a great way to expose students to those types of careers. However, one of the biggest reasons Alice would prefer to use a hands-on lab in her classroom is because she wants her students to have as much control over the experimental design process as possible, and they have minimal control of this in a virtual lab. In addition, she has seen some of her students zone out and she doesn't like that students don't get to see that some labs can go wrong or figure out how to deal with experimental errors. She is also very sensitive to the fact that if a student doesn't complete this lab during class, they might not have internet access at home to finish their work.
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Mika Hunter Twietmeyer has been teaching Biology and Earth & Environmental science at Riverside HS in Durham, NC for 7 years. She has taught these classes at standard and honors level and has also taught AP Biology. She defines a virtual lab as a simulation of a lab that would be done in class, a lab that models a concept that would be too complicated to observe in a classroom, or "something that you wouldn't ever look at NOT on a computer." This definition is telling in and of itself, in that her definition doesn't even include things that would be done on a computer instead of in the traditional hands-on way. She has found that virtual labs are great for exposing students to things that they didn't even know were out there and has observed that her students tend to be engaged when doing an online lab. However, she notes that there is usually not enough time to preview exactly what she wants the students to do and that it is more difficult to monitor student pacing and see what steps they skipped or did incorrectly. Overall, Mika recommends using virtual labs to provide students with experiences they wouldn't be able to get otherwise because of limited resources and advises teachers to test out any labs they find, check their sources, and make sure there is follow up or connection to other things they are teaching in class, such as a traditional lab or other activities.
Chemistry
Auburn James is entering her first year of teaching at Southern HS in Durham, NC this fall and will be teaching standard Physical Science and standard Chemistry. She completed teaching internships at Northern HS teaching standard Earth Science and AP Environmental Science and at Jordan HS teaching standard Biology and honors Chemistry. She defines a virtual lab as two separate things: 1) A website with simulations that allows students to observe models and receive data about scientific interactions; 2) A computer probe that students use to test and perform experiments in the classroom. She thinks that the benefit of virtual labs is that they allow students to see content that may be inaccessible to the classroom. She has noticed that her honors students tend to enjoy these labs, as they are motivated learners, but that the standard students frequently got distracted and off-task easily. The biggest drawback she sees is that they distance students from the material, furthering their false belief that science is not directly accessible to them. Auburn sums up her thoughts on online labs quite nicely: "I think students would most benefit if there were a way to establish a connection between online lab websites and data collected in the classroom. Ideally, online simulations would introduce a topic and then direct students to set up part of an experiment in the class laboratory, collect data, and input it on the computer. The website could then take student data and perform calculations to extend the experiment past the level of what can physically be done in the classroom. Online labs provide students with opportunities to experience the content beyond what can be done in the classroom but lack authentic, hands-on learning. If classroom experiments could be a part of online labs, students would see how the sometimes seemingly inaccessible world of science is relevant and directly connected to our classrooms."
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