The Role of Experiment in Physics Education: Attitudes of Upper Secondary School Students

The paper presents a segment of results obtained within a large study among Czech upper secondary students, whose general aim is to describe teachers’ and students’ views of physics experiments (and/or experimenting as such). The participants (N = 1,325) were asked closed questions concerning how they perceive experiments in physics lessons, how these lessons would look like without experiments and what is the respondents’ personal relation to physics experiments (not necessarily in the school context). Our results show that most often experiments are perceived as an enlivening element in physics lessons, a help with understanding the subject matter and an interesting complement to theory. On the other hand, only a minority of students perceive experiments as a tool physics uses to obtain new information about the world. Around half of the respondents admit that most of their physics lessons would not be affected in any way if experiments were removed. Concerning gender comparison, we found only rare differences at p < 0.05. Similarly, the answers were usually homogeneous across respondents’ year of study; the exceptions are discussed in the paper.


Introduction and rationale
Experiments play a truly significant role in physics teaching and learning [1,2].Better said, it is not a single role, but a set of roles and functions that are attributed to physics experiments in physics teaching and learning.Doing experiments, whether in the form of hands-on practical work or lecture demonstrations, should promote conceptual understanding, serve as a link between practice and theory, moderate attitudes towards physics, promote interest in students, provide a framework for illustrating the scientific method and scientific reasoning, teach students to recognize the nature of science, etc. Obviously, there are high expectations associated with experiments that are virtually impossible to fulfil.
It is important to ask what roles and functions (whether the above or others) are attributed to the experiments by teachers and students themselves.It seems reasonable to assume that if a teacher, for example, sees experiments as a means of developing conceptual understanding, he or she will select and implement them differently than if he or she were trying to develop interest.Conversely, if students perceive experiments as opportunities to relax and take a break from the class, the teacher's efforts to develop understanding may not be effective.
The question of how teachers and students perceive the role and function of physics experiments has been addressed in a large survey of Czech secondary school physics teachers.So far we have published several articles, each focusing on a particular set of research questions.The first of them [3] describes the qualitative part of the research, which was aimed at finding out the opinions of selected experienced upper secondary physics teachers on the role of experiments in physics education, in the form of semistructured interviews.The second article [4] deals with results from the teachers' version of the questionnaire, specifically with the question of how often are experiments included in physics lessons.The data from the teachers' questionnaire were evaluated also in [5], looking for an answer to where Czech upper secondary physics teachers look for inspiration for experimental ideas.
In this paper, we will build on these previous publications focusing on what roles students attribute to physics experiments in their lessons.

How students perceive experiments in physics teaching and learning
Although probably the main research focus concerning experiments in physics/science education is on their impact on learners' understanding, a considerable amount of published work also focuses on students' attitudes towards experiments.In general, experiments have long been shown to be a positive aspect of science teaching -for example, as Sharpe and Abrahams [6] report, pupils prefer practical group work to other non-practical methods of science teaching.Such a claim is also supported by a study in which Owen et al. [7] compared the views of pupils in Years 7-11 on different activities in physics lessons along two dimensions -how much pupils like them and how useful they perceive them.The results showed that experimental activities in which pupils work with their own hands (e.g.practical group work or making things) were rated as the most popular and useful.Abrahams [8], Palmer [9] and Lin et al. [10] also point out that practical group work, especially when engaged repeatedly, generates situational interest in pupils or students.What pupils also appreciate about practical group work is that they can interact with their classmates or, in a less formal way, with the teacher [6].
In terms of other forms of experimenting, specifically teacher-conducted science demonstrations, these were rated rather average in Owen's study [7].However, as Milne and Otieno [11], for example, point out, science demonstrations can stimulate positive emotional energy and increase pupils' engagement in learning.In the study of Walton [12], demonstrations helped to maintain the interest of most undergraduate chemistry students in the lecture.Similarly, to practical work, the effect of demonstrations on situational interest has also been demonstrated [9,10].
As stated by Angell et al. [13, p 697], pupils and students generally see "the main aim of experimental work in school science as showing the theory in practice"; the same is confirmed by Di Stefano [14] in the case of science demonstrations.However, according to Angell et al. [13, p 697], this way, experiments "do not succeed in illustrating for pupils the central role that (they) have in the development of physics and natural science".
Concerning the influence of learners' age, the general popularity of experiments, both science demos and hands-on work has been shown to decline as students progress through secondary education [13,15].

Research question
In the part of the research described in this paper, the following single question is asked: "Which roles of physics experiment mentioned by experienced teachers do students most identify with?"The opinions of experienced teachers were sought in the previous, qualitative phase of the research (which was described in the book of abstract [16] in detail), and those roles and functions of the experiment that they referred to most frequently were used when constructing items for a questionnaire.

Research design and tool
The evaluated part of the research was designed as quantitative, using an online questionnaire as a research tool.The questionnaire was created in two versions; the first for upper-secondary physics teachers, and the second for their students.Some parts of both versions contain identical items providing us with a possibility to compare teachers' and students' attitudes towards some aspects of their lessons, with an emphasis on their experimental component.
Both questionnaire versions are structured into three parts.In Part I, respondents are asked about information concerning themselves.Part II aims at describing the current state regarding the involvement of experimental activities in respondents' physics lessons.In Part III, respondents are asked about their view of the ideal state of physics lessons concerning experimental work.
Obviously, the information gathered by such an extensive questionnaire is very robust, so in this contribution, we focus just on a narrow subset of it.Firstly, we restricted this paper to data gathered from students only.Furthermore, we evaluated those three specific multiple-choice questions from Part II that, according to our view, could provide the best insight into the research question formulated above.To keep the text brief, the wording of these three questions is summarized in table 1, while the offered answers are provided in figures 1-3 in the Results section.

Participants and research procedure
An online electronic version of the questionnaire was published using the Typeform online platform.In November 2020, a link to the questionnaire was sent to more than 2000 e-mail addresses of Czech upper secondary physics teachers.The addressed teachers were asked both to fill in the teacher version of the questionnaire and to forward their students the link to a student version.
For data processing, we used the IBM SPSS Statistics 26 software.In searching for answers to the research question, we used basic descriptive statistics, typically (relative) frequencies.In the case of comparing the answers of several groups of respondents (gender, the grade of study), we tested the null hypothesis that the proportion of respondents with the given characteristic is the same in the compared groups.The output is the chi-square statistic and its corresponding p-value; for p < 0.05 we reject the null hypothesis.

Results
First, we can summarize some basic metadata about our respondents.The questionnaire was completed by N = 1,325 upper secondary students, of which 56% were women and 42% men.As far as the grade of study, 24% of respondents studying in grade 10, 32% in grade 11, 34% in grade 12 and 10% in last grade of upper secondary school.When asked about the next planned study, the participants answered as shown in table 2.

Arts 10%
Other field of study 16%

No further study 4%
Option Other field of study includes agricultural, military and other fields of study, which were indicated by less than 10% of respondents.The total sum of respondents exceeds 100% because everyone could select more than one option.
Let us now go through the three questions under study and comment on the findings obtained.Just recall once again that in these questions, the offered answers emerged from earlier qualitative research among experienced teachers.
At first we take a look at how students perceive physics experiments in their physics lessons (Q1).The results are summarized in Figure 1; no gender difference was found in any of the items.As a basic tool of physics in exploring the world.
As a time to relax.
As an interesting complement to physics theory.
As an activity that helps me with understanding.
As an enlivening of the lesson.
% of respondents An experiment in the lesson is a waste of time.
An experiment exhausts me.
An experiment in the lesson is difficult to prepare.
An experiment helps improve my manual skills.
An experiment forces me to think more.
An experiment is the basis of physics as a science.
An experiment will involve me more during the lesson.
An experiment illustrates the subject matter well.
An experiment helps me with understanding.

GIREP-2022
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2750 (2024) 012012 Figure 2 shows students' attitude towards physics experiments (Q2).In this case, we also distinguished between girls' and boys' responses; the items where statistically significant gender difference at p = 0.05 was found are highlighted in bold.Boys more often than girls perceive an experiment as the basis of physics as a science, while girls more often admit that an experiment makes them more involved in the lesson.
The last question we would like to evaluate in this paper is about physics lessons without experiments (Q3).The results are shown in figure 3; as in the case of Q1, no gender difference was found in any of the items.In addition to the gender differences discussed above, we also looked at differences in the frequency of particular answers by students' grade of study; table 3 contains data for only those answers, where there were found statistically significant differences or trends at p < 0.05.From this table, we can see that students in higher grades of study more often described the experiment as an interesting complement of physical theory and something that well illustrates the subject matter.Concurrently students in grade 10 describe significantly more often experiment as an opportunity to improve manual skills, but less often as a help for understanding the subject matter.Students in higher grades were also more likely to respond that without experiments, lessons would lose their important part.Nothing fundamental would change.
The lessons would lose their important part.
It would be sad, but most lessons would not be affected.

Discussion and conclusions
In this paper, we address the question of which roles of physics experiments (mentioned by experienced teachers) Czech upper secondary students most identify with.The findings summarized above represent a narrow segment of results obtained within a larger study on students' attitudes towards experiments.
Firstly, our results confirm the widely shared belief that students prefer experiments to other learning activities [6,7].In agreement with this, only a small part of our respondents considers physics experiments in their lessons a loss of time and a useless part of the lesson.On the other hand, students very frequently labelled physics experiments as an enlivening of the lesson or as an interesting complement to theory.However, although this finding is positive at first sight, even if students perceive experiments as more or less entertaining, they can learn only little from them -e.g.Crouch et al. [17] or Roth et al. [18] illustrate this in the case of lecture demonstration experiments.Even so, most of our respondents believe that physics experiments in lessons help them to better understand the subject matter.Finally, in agreement with e.g.Angell [13] our research confirms that the proportion of students who see the experiment as the basis of physics as a science is very small (in our sample especially in girls).
Although men's and women's attitudes towards physics as a school subject are usually considered different [19,20], we found only minor gender differences in perception of physics experiments.According to our data, boys more often view an experiment as the basis of physics as a science, while girls more often agree that an experiment makes them more involved in the lesson.
In our study, we generally have not observed strong shifts in perception of physics experiments with students' increasing grade of study (let us remind, for example, Angell et al. [13] or Wellington and Ireson [15] found an age-related decrease in students' interest in practical work).The few age trends we identified suggest that in the upper grades, students' appreciation of experiments rather increases -more specifically, there is a growing belief that experiments help with understanding, illustrate the subject matter, complement physics theory and with their absence, the lessons would lose their important part.On the contrary, a certain decrease was shown in the item "an experiment helps improve my manual skills".We believe the age dependence of students' attitudes can be influenced by the topic currently being taught and the number of experiments being conducted within it.For instance, mechanics, where a large number of simple, illustrative experiments are usually performed, is typically taught in the first grade at Czech upper secondary schools.The following topics (thermal physics, electricity, magnetism) are usually more advanced, the explanations are more abstract and the time devoted to experimenting more limited.Thus we can hypothesize whether, for example, experiments are somehow "rarer" for older students, leading respondents to evaluate them more positively than in Grade 10 (at least in terms of the trends described above).
Concerning the limitations of our research, we are aware that there is a double selection effect in the respondents' recruitment process because only active teachers forwarded the questionnaire to their students and only active students participated in the research.Furthermore, we administered the data collection during the time of the covid-19 pandemic; although students were explicitly asked about their common physics lessons, the long period of distance learning could have biased the results.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Which of the following best describes your personal relation to physics experiment?(N = 1319).

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.What would your physics lessons look like without physics experiments?(N = 1299).

Table 1 .
Evaluated questions addressing students to experimental activities in physics lessons.Which of the following best describes your personal relation to a physics experiment?Q3: What would your physics lessons look like without physics experiments?
Q1: How do you perceive experiments in physics lessons?Q2:

Table 3 :
Students' answers according to the grade of study.