Physical and Virtual Laboratories in Science and Engineering Education

narrative review of the physical-vs-virtual experimentation literature

School and university science and engineering laboratories, international.

Invited narrative review in Science, not a systematic review and not a meta-analysis: no search protocol, no inclusion criteria, no pooled estimate. It is authoritative because of who wrote it (the principal investigators of the physical-vs-virtual experimental programme) rather than because of its method, and those same authors' own trials are among the evidence reviewed — so the independence rating applies to the review's relationship to any commercial product, not to its relationship to the underlying studies. Recorded here as the standard citation a founder will meet for 'the science says both work'.

The canonical statement of the physical-vs-virtual position in the highest-visibility venue available. The review's position is that virtual laboratories can achieve conceptual learning outcomes comparable to physical ones, that each medium has affordances the other lacks (physical: apparatus familiarity, messy real data, error and uncertainty; virtual: speed, invisible mechanisms made visible, impossible or unsafe manipulations, many trials per minute), and that the best designs COMBINE the two rather than choosing. For the cost question the operative point is what the review does not claim: it nowhere argues that physical apparatus produces conceptual learning that virtual work cannot. Recorded at grade C because it is a narrative review by the authors of the studies it reviews, published in a venue with no systematic-review standard.

Not applicable.

Synthesises the Triona & Klahr, Klahr et al., Zacharia and Olympiou experiments already recorded separately in this archive; not itself a replication.