Improving perception of invisible phenomena in undergraduate physics education using ICT

Experimental learning plays paramount role in Physics education. Experimental physics requires phenomenological investigations in several cases and this includes understanding visible and invisible heuristic procedures to discern underlying concepts. This study investigates the invisible yet evident occurrences of physical phenomena that are difficult to grasp from a learner´s perspective. In this work the contribution of compounded effects of using computational techniques, multimedia enhanced simulations and interactive animations to draw the learner´s attention to those physically undiscernable aspects of physics experiments is presented. The study has investigated three physics experiments by engineering students (N= 42) and the methodology focused on differentiating the learning outcomes between classroom teaching, laboratory experimentation and virtual laboratories. The students were divided into two batches. Visual and conceptual understanding was quantified by assessments that included their visual and conceptual understanding. Our study not only revealed severe limitations in learning invisible phenomena based on traditional classroom methods but also empirically validated the positive impact on learning outcomes when the classroom method is combined with Virtual Labs approach.