Physical versus virtual manipulative experimentation in physics learning

182 students across 4 experimental conditions + 52 control = 234

Undergraduate students, University of Cyprus; heat and temperature concepts, Physics by Inquiry curriculum.

Pre-post design with four experimental conditions — Physical Manipulative Experimentation (PME), Virtual Manipulative Experimentation (VME), PME-then-VME, VME-then-PME — plus a traditional-instruction control with no manipulative experimentation at all. This is the design the K-12 literature lacks: it contains BOTH the physical-vs-virtual contrast AND a genuine no-manipulation control on the same content. Outcome is a conceptual test in the heat-and-temperature domain. Undergraduate population, hence excluded from this archive's age range.

OFF-SCOPE (undergraduate) but recorded because it contains the contrast the K-12 literature is missing, and because it splits the question correctly. Against a traditional-instruction control with no manipulation, all four experimentation conditions produced better conceptual understanding of heat and temperature — so DOING something with the phenomenon beat being told about it. But physical, virtual and both blended orderings were EQUALLY effective — so the thing that mattered was manipulation, not physicality. The authors' own formulation is that learning came from 'manipulation, either physical or virtual, and not physicality, as such'. That is the precise shape of the answer the cost question needs: the active ingredient is the student varying something and seeing what happens, and that ingredient is cheap. Caveats: undergraduates, single domain, researcher-designed immediate outcome, and the control arm received traditional instruction rather than an equally active non-manipulative alternative.

Low — assignment to condition within a single course.

Same finding as Triona & Klahr 2003, Klahr et al. 2007 and Zacharia et al. 2012 at school ages, and consistent with the 50/56 tally in Brinson 2015.