Examining Students’ Actions While Experimenting with a Blended Combination of Physical Manipulatives and Virtual Manipulatives in Physics

The purpose of this study was to investigate students’ actions while experimenting with a blended combination of Physical Manipulatives and Virtual Manipulatives (PMVM), as opposed to physical manipulatives (PM). The participants of the study were 70 undergraduate students of a university in Cyprus. Two groups of students were selected from each condition (15 students in total) and were compared in terms of their actions taking place while conducting two different experiments in the domain of Light and Color. The data collection involved two different data sources, namely, videos and screen-captured videos. The data analysis involved the use of a coding scheme, which was developed according to prior research. The results showed that the use of PMVM allowed students to repeat or expand the experiments at task, which enabled them to make more observations (collect more data/evidence) than their counterparts in PM condition. Students using only PM spent more time on setting up the experiment, which led them only to making as many observations as requested from the curriculum materials. Finally, the PMVM students were found to have more extensive and more productive discussions concerning the content at task than the PM students.