Developing and Supporting Student Projects in Upper-Division Physics Lab Courses

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Developing students' experimental physics skills is an important learning outcome for undergraduate physics education. Lab courses, especially those that include multi-week final projects, are a crucial avenue for learning such skills. However, due to a lack of extensive research on lab education, it is difficult to know which practices are most effective for achieving learning outcomes that are unique to lab courses. This project will produce a set of research-based, field-tested guidelines for final projects in lab courses and examples of them. These guidelines and examples will support instructors in designing projects that are likely to improve students' experimental physics skills. The availability of research-based guidelines will be a significant step toward lowering barriers to designing effective lab projects, which will help prepare students for careers in science and engineering.The goal of the project is to develop a compendium of research-based best practices for multi-week projects in upper-division physics lab courses using a Design-Based Implementation Research approach. The best practices will inform three major aspects of projects: (1) goals and framing of projects; (2) guidelines for the structure of projects, including authentic field-tested exemplars; and (3) guidelines for choosing appropriate assessments and interpreting their results. In particular, these best practices will be developed to promote learning objectives related to students' model-based reasoning skills, troubleshooting skills, expert-like documentation practices, and a sense of ownership over their projects. The best practices will undergo three iterations of research, development, and implementation. Across all three iterations, the project team will investigate the conditions under which student learning objectives are most likely to be met. Multiple types of data will inform the development and refinement of best practices, including student surveys, classroom observations, and interviews with students and instructors. Ultimately, this project will advance understanding of classroom practices that effectively develop students' experimental physics skills.