This study investigates whether Virtual Manipulatives (VM) within a Physical Manipulatives (PM)-oriented curriculum affect conceptual understanding of electric circuits and related experimentation processes. A pre-post comparison study randomly assigned 194 undergraduates in an introductory physics course to one of five conditions: three…

This study compares learning from designing instruction in the context of simulation-based inquiry learning with learning from expository teaching. The domain of instruction was the electricity domain of high-pass and low-pass filters. Participants were students from a technical vocational school. In the experimental condition ("N" =…

Constructing a representation in which students express their domain understanding can help them improve their knowledge. Many different representational formats can be used to express one's domain understanding (e.g., concept maps, textual summaries, mathematical equations). The format can direct students' attention to specific aspects of the…

This article describes a study into the role of heuristic support in facilitating discovery learning through simulation-based learning. The study compares the use of two such learning environments in the physics domain of collisions. In one learning environment (implicit heuristics) heuristics are only used to provide the learner with guidance…

In this study, the effects of different types of support for learning from multiple representations in a simulation-based learning environment were examined. The study extends known research by examining the use of dynamic representations instead of static representations and it examines the role of the complexity of the domain and the learning…

Discussion of computer simulations used for exploratory learning focuses on the design of a hypothesis scratchpad that students can use for hypothesis generation and testing. An experiment with college chemistry students that compared three versions of the scratchpad is described, and the effect of the scratchpads on learning environments is…