Meaningful learning of concepts of electric circuits making use of a virtual teaching environment by students of Young and Adult Education

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a teaching sequence that worked the fundamental concepts of electricity, as the intensity of the electric current, the electrical resistance and the combination of resistors in the Youth and Adult Education. The instructional material used as support of the teaching sequence was a Virtual Teaching Environment (VTE). The Virtual Teaching Environment includes issues related to simple electric circuits and its development is based on the principles of progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation as proposed by the Meaningful Verbal Learning Theory by David Ausubel. Another milestone of this work is the Conceptual Change Model by Posner and colleagues. In order to evaluate the impact of the proposed teaching sequence on the students’ learning of the subject we made use of qualitative and quantitative analysis. For this goal, two classrooms in the second phase of Education of Young and Adult level were divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group had access to the content through the VTE, while the control group accessed the content in the format of the traditional classroom. Data were collected in three moments: semi-structured clinical interview, test dissertation with real images of the components of simple electrical circuits and test dissertation with symbols usually used in physics to represent the electrical circuit components. All tests were applied before and after instruction. These tests were designed to search for evidence to the promotion of meaningful learning and conceptual change in students’ beliefs. The results, both quantitative and qualitative, indicate a significant difference in the post-tests of the experimental group as compared to the post-tests of the control group which points out to the positive effect of the proposed teaching sequence in to develop meaningful learning by the experimental group.