Breaking down the Laboratory Supertype Conflation

This Research Full Paper analyses a dissonance in the application of accepted educational theory to development and research on laboratories in education. Most existing research has tended to conflate multiple constituent factors, resulting in an inability to appropriately determine which specific factors are the cause of observed variations in learning outcomes, and an inability to reliably interpret the external validity of the research outcomes.We begin with an outline of the supporting educational theories that underpin our understanding of laboratory education. We then identify notable examples in the literature where multiple variables, such as the user interface and access modes, have been conflated into laboratory ‘supertypes’ and are not investigated independently. These supertypes reflect the most common variable combinations: ‘proximal laboratory, hands-on interface’, ‘remote laboratory, rich contextual interface’, and ‘simulated laboratory, decontextualized interface’, referred to as hands-on, remote, and simulated/virtual respectively.We then investigate the impacts of this conflation – in the context of examples, this conflation limits the generalisability of previous results and obscures potentially rewarding avenues of future research. Finally, we present methods by which research may be conducted to investigate technically simpler directions of interface decoupling, the results of which may motivate the investigation of more challenging pairings.