The impact of students' individual differences on conceptual understanding when combining real and virtual experiments in science education – A meta-analysis

Conceptual understanding plays a vital role in science education. Learning with combined real and virtual experiments can effectively promote students' conceptual understanding. However, the effect of combined versus single experiments has not been quantified for different science subjects yet. Moreover, students of different academic levels possess different levels of experience with the real and the virtual world and interact differently with real and virtual experiments. Additionally, males and females perceive learning with real and virtual experiments differently. In the present meta-analysis, we considered K = 25 articles with N = 41 effect sizes based on 2955 school and university students. Our meta-analysis provides robust evidence that combining real and virtual experiments can significantly enhance students' conceptual understanding in science ( ES = 0.71). Our results further reveal that neither academic level nor gender moderated this effect, suggesting that combining real and virtual experiments fosters conceptual understanding independent of these individual differences.