The impact of an online physics lab on university students' self-efficacy and understanding of thermal concepts during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has caused widespread disruption, necessitating tough decisions for global economy and services, including one of the central social pillars, education. As in the rest of the world, Greek universities transformed and adapted their educational services to continue to operate during the pandemic. This article presents how a series of a physics laboratory work for thermal concepts was conducted to evaluate its effectiveness on students’ understanding and its impact on their self-efficacy beliefs. The results showed that the post-test performance on students’ understanding of thermal concepts and their self-efficacy beliefs levels toward physics teaching were higher than pre-test performance but still moderate. A critical challenge was to maintain the experiential consistency with the in-person laboratory classes of all the previous academic years and the promotion of group work of students.