Interpersonal Communication of School Students in Physical Experimental Activity: The Aspect of Real and Digital Labs

The article deals with Lithuanian secondary school students' attitudes towards interpersonal communication in real (with traditional laboratory instruments) and digital physics laboratory work (labs). Performing laboratory work in physics, students work in groups where they can communicate, exchange technical information, and provide assistance to each other. Interpersonal communication between students depends of the forms of laboratory work: real or digital. In comparison to digital laboratory work, students can communicate with each other more doing real laboratory work. This has led to a scientific problem, which is formulated as a question: What is the attitude of school students to the real and digital physics labs and their role in interpersonal communication? The aim of the research is to disclose the role of real and digital physics labs in the secondary school students' interpersonal communication. Real and digital laboratory work in physics was carried out in accordance with the second stage of inquiry based learning, namely structured inquiry. This method encouraged students to communicate and collaboratively search for an unknown result of a lab. The study was based on interpersonal communication model on the three levels of communication: I-It; I-You; I-Thou. The interpersonal communication of students was assessed in the following aspects: interpersonal distance, interpersonal trust, and interpersonal communication in terms of expectations and friendship. The study based on ANOVA data block revealed the attitude of the school students towards the real and digital physics labs, their role in the nature of interpersonal communication (interpersonal distance, interpersonal trust, interpersonal expectations).