PhET interactive simulations in physics teaching practices: a meta-analysis

Abstract

By combining the results of various independent studies, a meta-analysis synthesizes an overview of the empirical knowledge previously limited to individual studies. Such a study was conducted specifically on the scientific literature regarding the use of PhET Interactive Simulations in physics education, given the magnitude of the PhET project. This work consists of a systematic review of 1,589 publications indexed in the ERIC, Scopus, IOP Science, and WOS databases, from which 22 articles were selected for a meta-analysis study. The research questions addressed are: (1) What is the impact of PhET simulations on learning physics? (2) How effective are these simulations compared to conventional learning methods, whether theoretical or experimental? The analyses considered the effectiveness of PhET simulations in learning physics by collecting data on sample sizes, means, and standard deviations. The effectiveness of PhET simulations in learning physics was duly demonstrated, revealing superiority or, at the very least, equivalence when compared to the use of conventional laboratories and traditional teaching methods.