Do Computer Simulations Allow a Better Understanding of Basic Electrical Circuits than Real Lab Experiments?

Several Authors have demonstrated that substituting computer simulations for real experiments conducted in a lab may help to improve students' understanding of the material. In the present work we try to understand the reasons for this intriguing finding and investigate possible prerequisites necessary to achieve this outcome. The study was conducted in an introductory college-level physics class in Germany. All simulations were performed using PSPICE.