From Cook Book to Exploration: Optimizing Learning Gains in Introductory Physics Laboratory Instruction

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Traditional laboratory exercises are often intended to provide hands-on experience in science to students, reinforce the rules and relationships presented in lecture, and convey a sense that science is cool. Other potential goals, such as clarifying the scientific method and improving student understanding of measurement, error and assumptions, are poorly framed and largely neglected during instruction. Even primary goals are not always made clear, which frustrates students and promotes negative attitudes toward the laboratory, or worse, science in general. This project is developing three different instructional strategies for the laboratory component of an introductory physics course: a strongly guided, content-focused strategy; a question-driven, minimally guided strategy; and a question-driven, scientific ability-focused strategy. Each of these strategies is being developed with assessable student learning outcomes in mind, to ensure that we can evaluate the success of each strategy. Formative assessment of student efforts to reach these goals involves rubric-based evaluation of individual laboratories and laboratory-focused examination questions. Summative assessment incorporates the final exam, FCI or CSEM, and CLASS. This assessment is informing future iterations of laboratory instruction and provides significant insight about strategies for laboratory-based education in the science education community. Broader impact: This project advances understanding on how different levels of guidance in content and scientific abilities impact student learning, epistemological beliefs, and laboratory skills. As laboratory instructors can have very different goals for their courses, the project is assessing several different outcomes to determine how instructors can design their laboratories to match these goals. Furthermore, the project is gathering additional data on student behavior in laboratories - through videotapes and interviews - that can be used to structure laboratories and modify how students interact with each other, the instructor, and the laboratory equipment. The quantitative and qualitative data allow for extensive collaborations with other researchers and can advance understanding on designing, implementing, and assessing laboratories. Intellectual Merit: The project is deeply embedded in current research in STEM education. Recent research on student learning in the laboratory setting suggests that the instructional strategy is crucially important. The STEM community is just beginning to develop a cohesive framework for understanding these factors, and this study plays a pivotal role in its development. The laboratory component of an introductory science course is often the only exposure that nonmajors get on what physicists do and how they think. Without effective laboratory instruction, students may leave the course with unclear views about science and be less knowledgeable consumers of scientific research beyond the classroom. By helping instructors develop laboratories that not only impact future scientists, but help develop the scientific content knowledge and abilities of the general public, the project can lead to a more scientifically literate society, able to make reasoned decisions involving scientific data.