Examination of science teachers' opinions on virtual laboratory applications in the COVID-19 distance education process

The main purpose of this research is to determine the views of science teachers about virtual laboratory in the distance education. The opinions of the teachers were determined by using the 36-item virtual laboratory opinion scale (VLOS) developed by Ekici (2015). For this research, descriptive survey model, one of the quantitative research methods, was used. In the study, causal comparison from relational survey models was used, as it was aimed to compare the opinions of teachers in terms of variables such as gender, age, professional experience, duration of internet use of teachers, availability of a science laboratory in the school they work, and how many times a week were used in the study. The sample of the study consisted of science teachers working in middle schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in the central two districts of Malatya. The collected data were analyzed with the SPSS-25 package program. According to the results obtained by the analysis of the data, the opinions of the teachers about the virtual laboratory show a statistically significant positive difference. When the sub-problems of the study were examined in terms of variables such as gender, age, professional experience, availability of science laboratory at school, weekly laboratory usage time, it was concluded that no statistically significant difference was observed. Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic, Virtual laboratory, science, distance education, views