Laboratory activities and the perception of students

The perception students have towards laboratory activities has been analyzed on the basis of the results of a questionnaire. It has been examined a sample of 99 High School students and about 270 university students, the latter attending the three years of the Physics Bachelor degree course at the University of Turin. It has been considered interesting to analyze the perception students of different ages and school levels have towards laboratory activities. After a preliminary phase of study on the expectations and the perceptions of the students related to laboratory activities, we decided to conduct a more detailed analysis of the students’ opinions evolution. We investigated different aspects, such as comprehension of the concepts of Physics, interest in laboratory activities, complementary nature of laboratory activities and classroom lectures. Questions were gathered together into some main streams: • The usefulness of laboratory to attain a greater comprehension of Physics; • The interest in and the complementary nature of laboratory activities and classroom lessons; • Increasing of the capacity to use other instruments, whether of an informatics type or others (not presented here); • The usefulness and ease of use of the informatics instrumentation. (not presented here) We then conducted an analysis for each question by means of a chi-square test, considering a null hypothesis, which followed a simple uniform statistical distribution. We also analyzed the elements that students considered as positive or negative in laboratory activities during their years of learning. The analysis work conducted on the questionnaire responses has pointed out some considerations that offer several ideas, which could inspire future didactic programing.