Abstract

Op weg naar een didactiek voor natuurkunde-experimenten op afstand. Ontwerp en evaluatie van een via internet uitvoerbaar experiment voor leerlingen uit het voortgezet onderwijs. The subject of this thesis is a developmental study on ?remote experimenting? in education. It concerns the development of a remote experiment that enables pre-university students to carry out a physics experiment at a distance via the internet. Remote experiments can offer several (practical) benefits when compared to conventional experiments but the desire to exploit these benefits put special demands on the design of the experiment, since the students might be conducting the experiment without a teacher in the vicinity. As a consequence of these demands it was decided to focus on exploring the possibilities and problems of remote experiments conducted in the absence of a teacher. The research was carried out in two cycles and focused on the development of a remote experiment that could be conducted autonomously by pre-university students to measure the speed of light in several media. This should answer the global question: What should a technically, as well as didactically, well-functioning remote experiment look like? The first cycle had an explorative character. It showed that technically the experiment already functioned quite well. However, many problems were observed concerning the content, and the way the students were tackling it. This led to two categories of recommendations. Concerning the content, the material should aim at making the students more aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it and several content related problems needed to be avoided. The second category of recommendations concerned the format of the material: the design and the working method. Special attention should be paid to designing a clear structure for the website and adding interaction and control, (feedback- and reflection facilities) to activate the students and guide them through the material. In the second research cycle these recomme