Pilot Study on Experience of Engineering Students in Multimedia-enhanced Introductory Physics Labs

摘要

Both literature and anecdotal evidence suggest that students, on average, do not critically read textbooks before coming to class. This lack of student preparedness is detrimental to creating an active and engaging learning environment. The increase in students' reliance on mobile phones and computers over books, further exacerbates this issue. While previous studies have shown that students learn better from reading print texts over digital texts, the students exhibit clear preference for digital medium; in addition to that, forcing students to read texts before coming to class can be challenging. This study does not aim to explore this premise, as the multimedia learning modules (MLMs) employed in this study contain much more than pure text. To build on that, tailoring the content delivery mechanisms to be more accessible to students via computers and mobile devices is one way to mediate the lack of student preparedness. This added resource may enable students to become more familiar with the material before coming to class, and several prior studies have used other institutions' or commercial MLMs to this end. In addition, higher frequency of interaction with different means of representing the same content correlated well with higher learning gains in another study. Finally, higher level of student preparedness could then result in more class time being used to discuss and explore higher learning activities. For example, instead of spending the lab time to comprehend what steps they need to take to acquire the data or grasp the theory and/or vocabulary, the students could scrutinize their data acquisition methods, and attempt to minimize any systematic or random errors in their setup or measurement techniques.