Teacher Mediation in a Collaborative Learning Laboratory of Physics, a Virtual Environment for Teaching and Learning

We know that physics is a difficult subject for many students to understand. From this observation, several studies have been performed to investigate the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Among the numerous existing lines of study, we find investigations on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Based on Vygotsky’s theory, we developed a Virtual Environment for Teaching and Learning (VETL) to foster interaction and collaborative participation among students, and between them and the teacher, to solve problems in physics. We seek to present in this paper how teacher mediations should be conducted in this environment in order to foster collaborative interactions and thus facilitate the internalization of scientific concepts by students. We found that students have an expectation as to the participation of the teacher in the environment, and as a consequence the teacher should seek to virtually interact with all groups, even those who have managed to solve the problem by themselves, at least to communicate to the students if they solved it correctly.