Effect of an inquiry-based teaching sequence on secondary school students’ understanding of wave optics

Wave optics is a mandatory part of Croatian secondary school physics curriculum for students in the final year of secondary school (age 18–19). Many physics education research studies have shown that it is a difficult physics topic for both university and secondary school students. An inquiry-based teaching sequence on wave optics, designed for eight 45-min teaching periods, was developed by the authors. The sequence included four investigative students’ experiments on the topics of interference, diffraction, and polarization of light, as well as several teacher demonstrations. The experimental group included six classes of students from six different Croatian urban secondary schools, who underwent the teaching intervention with the new inquiry-based sequence on wave optics, whereas the control group consisted of six classes from the same schools, taught in a predominantly lecturing way. Both groups were post-tested with the same instrument, the Conceptual Survey on Wave Optics (CSWO), to evaluate the research hypothesis that the new sequence might improve students’ conceptual understanding better than the traditional teaching. The results of the experimental and control groups were analyzed and compared using the Rasch analysis. The results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in four out of five conceptual areas probed by the CSWO, suggesting that the new inquiry-based teaching sequence may contribute to stronger development of secondary school students’ conceptual understanding of wave optics, especially concerning typical wave optics patterns, reasoning from experiments, and explaining basic wave optics phenomena. A questionnaire on attitudes toward the teaching intervention was administered to students and it was found that students generally liked the inquiry-based teaching intervention and expressed positive attitudes to interactive, experimental, and collaborative aspects of physics teaching. The results are very promising, but their generalization may be limited by the selection of the students, as well as by the short duration of the teaching intervention and the relatively small breadth of the covered topics.