The experimental study carried out involved the compar-
ison of the effect of PME (i.e., exposure to physicality
throughout the study), VME (i.e., no exposure to physicality),
two sequential combinations of PME and VME (i.e., partial
exposure to physicality) and traditional instruction (control
condition, that is, absence of physical and virtual manipulation
of materials and apparatus) on undergraduate students’
understanding of physics concepts in the domain of
H
&
T
.
The control condition was derived from the
Olympiou
(2006)
study that aimed at comparing, among others, the
effect of PME with that of a traditional mode of instruction
within the context of the Physics by Inquiry curriculum on
undergraduate students’ understanding of concepts concerning
temperature, changes in temperature, heat, heat transfer, heat
capacity, and specific heat. This former study was contextu-
alized in the same manner as the present study and involved
the same data collection processes and sources. In particular,
in both the control and experimental conditions the same
curriculum/teaching material (same four sections from the
Physics by Inquiry curriculum, pp. 163
e
184) was used. In the
case of the control condition, this material was presented to
the students through lectures that involved demonstrations of
the study’s experiments. These demonstrations were made
either through the use of videos or real-time demonstrations
(both projected on a screen) by the instructor. The experiments
included in all demonstrations were conducted through PME.
The idea behind the demonstrations was to match, to the
highest degree, what the students hear and see in both the
control and experimental conditions.