Seminarium i undervisning och lärande i matematik

Abstrakt finns enbart på engelska: The Physics Education Group at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, Croatia has recently completed a five year research project investigating effects of inquiry-based teaching, involving students' investigative experiments, on secondary school students' conceptual understanding of wave optics. The project had several components: investigation of student conceptual difficulties in wave optics through interviews after standard instruction, construction and evaluation of a new diagnostic instrument (the CSWO), design of a new inquiry-based teaching sequence on wave optics for secondary school, assembly and partial development of experimental equipment for school experiments on wave optics, training of teachers involved in the project, implementation of the new teaching sequence in six secondary schools in Zagreb and the evaluation of its effectiveness. These components, which resulted in several publications in Phys. Rev. PER, will be presented and discussed. The overall results suggest that the new sequence outperformed standard teaching on wave optics with a large effect size (Cohen's d = 0.8), suggesting that the new inquiry-based teaching sequence may contribute to stronger development of secondary school students’ conceptual understanding of wave optics, especially concerning recognition of typical wave optics patterns, reasoning from experiments, and explaining basic wave optics phenomena.

This seminar is a joint for the two group TLM at Mathematical Sciences and PER at Physics.