Hands-on and Virtual laboratories to undergraduate Chemistry education: Toward a pedagogical integration

Several researchers report that practical experimentation arouses a strong interest among students in Chemistry learning. Also, the classes held in didactic laboratories enhance the learning ability of the students, because they help the understanding of the subject matter. There are also reports stating that students feel more motivated to learn Chemistry when they make use of practical and dynamic classes. However, the availability of laboratories to carry out practical activities is difficult to found in different levels of education in several countries. This paper assumes that the expansion of resources to increase the experimental practice of Chemistry can be achieved by developing virtual laboratories in a way of helping them to get involved in active learning. In this work a virtual laboratory, called VirtuaLabQ, with predefined experiments about Chemical Transformations is introduced. Also, a case study that shows the use of VirtuaLabQ integrated to hands-on laboratory is presented. The case study was performed with Engineering undergraduate students that attend the Chemical Transformation course. The main target of this study was to investigate if practicing the experiments previously in VirtuaLabQ improves the students' performance in experiments accomplished in a hands-on chemistry laboratory. Two sets of laboratory experiments were conducted, in wich students first performed online activities in VirtuaLabQ and after in the hands-on laboratory, during regular class time. Also, students answered questionnaires evaluating the performance of each experiment in virtual and hands-on laboratory. Four questions were chosen to be analyzed in order to check the main target of this work. Results indicate that the integration of virtual and hands-on experiments in a Chemistry undergraduate course assists in the good performance of students in a hands-on laboratory and can contribute to the improvement of student learning. However, improvements in VirtuaLabQ and new case studies are necessary to confirm these findings, considering, for example, other kind of evaluations that effectively compare student performance besides self-evaluation.