Julia Woithe (2014 – 2020) Designing, measuring and modelling the impact of the hands-on particle physics learning laboratory S’Cool LAB at CERN
Effects of student and laboratory characteristics on high-school students’ cognitive and affective outcomes:
In the framework of this PhD project, S’Cool LAB, a new out-of-school hands-on learning laboratory for high-school students was developed at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Particle physics learning activities were designed to help students understand the physics and technologies of the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, while also fostering their interest in physics, self-beliefs and scientific curiosity. To maximise the educational potential of this unique opportunity at CERN, the development of learning activities was based on documented students’ conceptions and took recent research results about interest, curiosity, cognitive activation and cognitive load into account. To analyse the educational effectiveness of half-day hands-on sessions in S’Cool LAB, and to understand the relevance of student and laboratory characteristics, more than 500 students from 15 different countries took part in a quantitative study employing a single group, pre- and post-test research design. In particular, different types of novelty factors were assessed and used to model S’Cool LAB’s educational outcomes in both single-level and multi-level linear models. The results of the S’Cool LAB evaluation study confirmed high educational effectiveness of its hands-on sessions. Despite the very short intervention time of only 4.5 hours, participation in a half-day hands-on session in S’Cool LAB led to medium-sized effects on students’ physics interest (d=0.6) and their conceptual understanding (d=0.7), as well as a small effect on students’ physics self-beliefs (d=0.4). Here, girls benefited more from the hands-on sessions in S’Cool LAB with respect to physics interest (d=0.8) and self-beliefs (d=0.5) than did boys (d=0.5 & 0.3). Consequently, the initial gender gap with girls reporting slightly lower dispositional physics interest (d=0.3) and physics self-beliefs (d=0.4) was closed with respect to their situational interest and self-beliefs. In summary, S’Cool LAB outperforms other hands-on out-of-school learning labs by triggering very high situational interest and self-beliefs even for students whose dispositional interest and physics self-beliefs were already very high. Furthermore, S’Cool LAB demonstrates that out-of-school learning labs can foster students’ conceptual understanding significantly without compromising the positive impact on other variables, such as interest and self-beliefs. Students’ perception of support by the learning environment and by the educators in S’Cool LAB were crucial elements of their novelty experience and were associated with especially high affective outcomes. In particular, students highly appreciated the volunteering CERN scientists and perceived their support as very valuable. Furthermore, students’ perception of their cognitive preparedness and their cognitive load were vital with respect to the cognitive effects of S’Cool LAB.
University of Kaiserslautern, Prof. J. Kuhn & Prof. A. Müller (University of Geneva)