Learning Environments
The regular curriculum that the students follow includes topics such as energy sources,
resistance, circuits, Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff ’s laws, alternating current, and magnetic fields. In
this curriculum students have textbook and practical lab lessons. The emphasis in the textbook lessons is on facts, definitions, formulas, and procedural skills (calculating parameters
such as voltage, current, resistance, and power); in the practical lessons, students build electrical circuits and perform electricity measurements in these circuits. Two books are used: a textbook in which facts, definitions, and formulas are presented
and procedures are explained, and an exercise book with chapters
that correspond to the chapters in the textbook. These chapters briefly repeat the topics
treated in the textbook, provide more in-depth explanations of procedures, pose questions
about facts and definitions, and give assignments in which students are required to calculate
parameters. The experiment covered part of the topics treated in the regular curriculum,
namely electrical circuits (series, parallel, and mixed connections), Ohm’s law, and some elements of Kirchhoff ’s laws. Two computer-based learning environments were used in the
experiment, one for each condition.