Multi-level simple experiments: an approach with increasing cognitive demands

Simple experiments are indispensible part of physics teachers’ repertoire. Simple experiments are met in various activities ranging from demonstrations to home experiments, as a base for active learning methods, for student projects or even as a base for competitions. But there is more than that. Carefully selected simple experiments offer also a great opportunity to be presented as sequences of structured problems that all together form complete stories. The central characters are the same through the whole story but the depth and cognitive level is gradually increasing from simple demonstrations of the phenomena, problems that promote qualitative reasoning, problems that require observations, predictions and construction of mathematical models, to more complex reasoning and design of measurements suitable for introductory physics in high school or first year university level. Teacher may take and use in the classroom just part of such a story, depending on the level she teaches, but understanding the whole story gives her deeper and wider view of the problem and thus increases her professional self-confidence which is so essential for successful implementation of active learning methods. Examples of multi-level simple experiments will be presented.