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Register a new userWho does what now? How physics lab instruction impacts student behaviors
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While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we performed in-lab observations of student actions over two semesters in two pedagogically different sections of the same introductory physics course. We used a cluster analysis to identify different categories of student behaviour and analyzed how they correlate with lab structure and gender. We find that, in lab structures which fostered collaborative group work and promoted decision making, there was a task division along gender lines with respect to laptop and equipment usage (and found no such divide among students in guided verification labs).
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It is a well-studied notion that women are under-represented in the physical sciences, with a leaky pipeline metaphor describing how the number of women decreases at higher levels in academia[1,2]. It is unclear, however, where the major leaks exist and what factors are responsible for this[2]. Our focus here is on women in physics with an emphasis on practical laboratory work.
In deciding on a students grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point scale (where each whole number 0-4 corresponds to a letter grade) and the percent scale (where letter grades A through D are uniformly distributed in the top 40% of the scale). This paper uses grading data from a single series of courses offered over a period of 10 years to show that the grade distributions emerging from these two grade scales differed in many ways from each other. Evidence suggests that the differences are due more to the grade scale than to either the students or the instructors. One major difference is that the fraction of students given grades less than C- was over 5 times larger when instructors used the percent scale. The fact that each instructor who used both grade scales gave more than 4 times as many of these low grades under percent scale grading suggests that the effect is due to the grade scale rather than the instructor. When the percent scale was first introduced in these courses in 2006, one of the authors of this paper, who is also one of the instructors in this data set, had confidently predicted that any changes in course grading would be negligible. They were not negligible, even for this instructor.
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.
In this exploratory qualitative study, we describe instructors self-reported practices for teaching and assessing students ability to troubleshoot in electronics lab courses. We collected audio data from interviews with 20 electronics instructors from 18 institutions that varied by size, selectivity, and other factors. In addition to describing participants instructional practices, we characterize their perceptions about the role of troubleshooting in electronics, the importance of the ability to troubleshoot more generally, and what it means for students to be competent troubleshooters. One major finding of this work is that, while almost all instructors in our study said that troubleshooting is an important learning outcome for students in electronics lab courses, only half of instructors said they directly assessed students ability to troubleshoot. Based on our findings, we argue that there is a need for research-based instructional materials that attend to both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of troubleshooting proficiency. We also identify several areas for future investigation related to troubleshooting instruction in electronics lab courses.
In this study, we investigated the employment status of recent University of Ottawa physics MSc and PhD graduates, finding that 94% of graduates are either employed or pursuing further physics education one year post-graduation. Our database was populated from the public online repository of MSc and PhD theses submitted between the academic years of 2011 to 2019, with employment information collected in 2020 from the professional social media platform LinkedIn. Our results highlight that graduates primarily find employment quickly and in their field of study, with most graduates employed in either academia or physics-related industries. We also found that a significant portion of employed graduates, 20%, find employment in non-traditional physics careers, such as business management and healthcare. Graduates with careers in academia tend to have lower online connectivity compared to graduates with careers in industry or non-traditional fields, suggesting a greater importance for online networking for students interested in non-academic careers.
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