What do secondary school students think about experimental practices in science lessons taught in distance education?

Abstract

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, which took the world under its influence, many countries, including our country, switched to distance education. During this period, students did not go to schools and lessons continued to be taught online remotely. In this study, it was aimed to investigate secondary school students' opinions about conducting experiments in science lessons in the distance education process. The study group consisted of 587 secondary school students receiving education in 24 schools located in different regions of Turkey. The form consisting of five open-ended questions used as the data collection tool was developed by the researchers. The descriptive content analysis method was used to analyse the data obtained. In the first question, in which the opinions of students about experiment practices in science lesson were investigated during the distance education process, the answers included in the theme of positive opinion were encountered the most. The greatest difficulty faced by students in conducting experiments in distance education was found to be related to the physical conditions they had. Among the expectations of the students, the most common response was related to increasing experimental practices in distance education. The students stated that they found conducting experiments face to face to be more effective and advantageous compared to conducting experiments in distance education. They also made various suggestions regarding the features of the experimental practices. In line with the results of this study, since it was determined that students found it more effective to do face-to-face experiments, it is thought that it would be appropriate to include experimental practices more, especially in lessons conducted face-to-face, at least in the classrooms where hybrid education is applied.