Can 'ears-on' help hands-on science learning - for girls and boys?

The primary objective of the research was to establish whether the use of t he newly developed audio-pilot (a personalized auditory commentary system) facilitates both hands-on exploration and the understanding of scientific p rinciples in a science centre. Twenty-four ten year-old children used the A udio-Pilot while they interacted with a set of pendulum experiments. A cont rol group of 28 children from the same classes experienced the same experim ents but without the Audio-Pilot. Videos were made of all the children and their behaviours were later coded. They completed a questionnaire about pen dulums before and after going to the science centre. A gender effect emerge d. The audio-pilot greatly facilitated the girls' hands-on activity and imp roved their questionnaire scores, which was highly statistically significan t. This suggests that auditory commentaries are a good way of communicating difficult scientific concepts, especially to girls. Further research is ne eded to confirm whether this finding can be generalized over different scho ols.