Effects of Writing to Learn Activities in Hands-on and Virtual Laboratory Environments

Abstract

The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach mainly developed by Hand and Keys (1999). The approach involves two sets for both teachers and students to be mindfully active in an inquiry based laboratory environments. The set for students provides scaffolds in written form in order to help metacognition about their lab experiments (Hohenshell & Hand, 2006) and the set for teachers enable them to design inquiry based science laboratories. In the current study, it was investigated that the effects of SWH approach in hands-on and virtual lab environments on pre-service science teachers’ laboratory skills and science achievements. Quasi-experimental research design was used in the current study. Participants of the study were 52 pre-service science teachers. They were assigned into two groups, one of which them used hands-on laboratory environment, coded as control group. The other group used virtual laboratory environment called as experimental group. The attitude scale towards laboratory skills and the achievement test were used in the study. Overall results indicated that SWH based lab environments are equally effective on students’ attitudes and achievements.