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Register a new userTransforming a large introductory lab course: impacts on views about experimental physics
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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.
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Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment tool that measures such understanding. The PMQ was designed to characterize student reasoning into point or set paradigms, where the set paradigm is more aligned with expert reasoning. We analyzed over 500 student open-ended responses collected at the beginning and the end of a traditional introductory lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder. We discuss changes in students understanding over a semester by analyzing pre-post shifts in student responses regarding data collection, data analysis, and data comparison.
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.
A set of virtual experiments were designed to use with introductory physics I (analytical and general) class, which covers kinematics, Newton laws, energy, momentum, and rotational dynamics. Virtual experiments were based on video analysis and simulations. Only open educational resources (OER) were used for experiments. Virtual experiments were designed to simulate in-person physical laboratory experiments. All the calculations and data analysis (analytical and graphical) were done with Microsoft excel. Formatted excel tables were given to students and step by step calculations with excel were done during the class. Specific emphasis was given to student learning outcomes such as understand, apply, analyze and evaluate. Student learning outcomes were studied with detailed lab reports per each experiment and end of the semester written exam (which based on experiments). Lab class was fully web-enhanced and managed by using a Learning management system (LMS). Every lab class was recorded and added to the LMS. Virtual labs were done by using live video conference technology and labs were tested with the both synchronous and asynchronous type of remote teaching methods.
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.
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.
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