Abstract

• The main purpose of this study is to find out the effectiveness of hands-on and minds-on activities in physics learning of high school students. In this study, experimental research design (both qualitative and quantitative) was used. Sixty Grade Nine students from BEHS (2) Lanmadaw, Yangon were chosen as the participants of this study by using purposive sampling. The participants were divided into two groups: experimental group and control group. There were thirty students in each group. The four physics activities were constructed from Grade 9 Physics Curriculum (2017 2018 Academic Year). Before conducting intervention by using hands-on and minds-on activities, students were administered the pretest (comprised 50 multiple-choice items) in order to assess their achievement on prior knowledge in physics learning. After intervention, students took the posttest in order to determine their ideas, thinking and problem solving ability on physics learning. In this study, the observation checklist including ten items was developed for treatment verification. The results showed that the mean scores of control group (27.23) for pretest was slightly higher than experimental group (26.50). However, the results of t-test showed that there was no significant difference between experimental group and control group for pretest. On the other hand, the mean scores of experimental (36.77) for posttest was higher than that of control group (26.67). According to this study, the t-test result showed that there was a significant difference between two group for posttest. In control group, the mean scores of pretest and posttest were (26.20) and (27.70). And, the t-test result showed that there was a significant difference between pretest and posttest scores in control group. And then, in experimental group, the mean scores of posttest (36.77) was higher than that of pretest (26.50). Moreover, the results of t-test also showed that there was a significant difference between pretest and posttest of experimental group. Thus, the results can be concluded that the experimental group performed better than the control group because students in experimental group studied their physics lessons with hands-on and minds-on activities.