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Register a new userCorrelating students views about experimental physics with their sense of project ownership
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Added by
Dimitri Dounas-Frazer
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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No Arabic abstract
Multiweek projects in physics labs can engage students in authentic experimentation practices, and it is important to understand student experiences during projects along multiple dimensions. To this end, we conducted an exploratory quantitative investigation to look for connections between students pre-project views about experimental physics and their post-project sense of project ownership. We administered the Colorado Learning Attitudes About Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) and the Project Ownership Survey (POS) to 96 students enrolled in 6 lab courses at 5 universities. E-CLASS and POS scores were positively correlated, suggesting that students views about experimentation may be linked to their ownership of projects. This finding motivates future studies that could explore whether these constructs are causally related.
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Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices, reinforcing concepts, and inspiring students interest and engagement in physics. Some of these outcomes can be measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS), a research-based assessment that measures students views about experimental physics. We used E-CLASS at the University of Colorado Boulder to measure learning outcomes during a course transformation process in which views about experimental physics were reflected in the learning goals. We collected over 600 student responses per semester from the large introductory laboratory course, both before and after implementing the course transformation. While we observed no statistically significant difference in overall post-instruction E-CLASS scores before and after the transformation, in the transformed course, student responses to three E-CLASS items that related to the goals of the transformation were more favorable than in the original course.
We present an investigation into the interdisciplinary role of physics in a physics-for-non-physicists course at Pomona College. This work is guided by prior research into introductory physics for life-science (IPLS) courses, but attends to significant differences in the scope and context of this course. We interviewed enrolled students, physics professors, and professors from non-physics disciplines to explore the function of this course and the role of physics in the education of non-physics-science students. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, then analyzed to identify emergent themes. These themes outline the authentic physics, including content knowledge and other, broader learning objectives, that play an important and distinct role in the science education of enrolled students. Stakeholders generally align in their emphasis of interdisciplinary relevance with some divergence in the specific articulation of that idea. The differences can be understood through the stakeholders distinct areas of expertise, with non-physics professors expressing value through relevance to their discipline and physics professors focusing on essential aspects of physics.
We describe an undergraduate course where physics students are asked to conceive an outreach project of their own. The course alternates between the project conception and teachings about pedagogy and outreach, and ends in a public show. We describe its practical implementation and benefits. Through a student survey and an analysis of their projects, we discuss the merits and flaws of this learning-by-doing teaching approach for physics.
Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses: measurement uncertainty. Accordingly, when the stand-alone introductory lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) was recently transformed, measurement uncertainty was the focus of a learning goal of that transformation. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ), a research-based assessment of student understanding around statistical measurement uncertainty, was used to measure the effectiveness of that transformation. Here, we analyze student responses to the PMQ at the beginning and end of the CU course. We also compare such responses from two semesters: one before and one after the transformation. We present evidence that students in both semesters shifted their reasoning in ways aligned with the measurement uncertainty learning goal. Furthermore, we show that more students in the transformed semester shifted in ways aligned with the learning goal, and that those students tended to communicate their reasoning with greater sophistication than students in the original course. These findings provide evidence that even a traditional lab course can support valuable learning, and that transforming such a course to align with well-defined learning goals can result in even more effective learning experiences.
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