A few things stood out to this US-based reviewer about this paper, which reports on a study in Taiwan comparing whether students who took part in a science lab that was purely simulated learned the material better or worse than students who took part in a physical lab. First, the label “low achiever” was tied to students from a less-prestigious high school than the “high achievers,” not tied to individual skills. Also, these “low achievers” were vocational students. If “vocational students” in Taiwan refers to students who want to work with their hands, this might have had a strong effect. The other thing that concerned me was that the measure of success was performance on a test.

This left an interesting question unanswered: Why DO we do labs? Is it to learn the material, or to learn scientific process and to be absorbed by inquiry, maybe to make it a career? That is the more difficult question, and unfortunately this paper fixates on the test. However, the findings and what was and was not measured are intriguing. If you are interested in the limits or advantages of pure simulation versus mixed-mode learning, you will find this paper interesting.