Instructional Laboratory for Experimental Training (INLET)

来自政府和行业的许多报告呼吁高校培养更多、更有能力的STEM毕业生。为了吸引更多的学生到STEM领域，教师需要使课程更具吸引力和相关性。教学方法的一个重要转变是用基于发现的课程取代传统的实验室课程，让学生接触研究技术和设备。在本计画中，研究者将运用一套设计原则，对高等物理实验课程中的三个实验进行改革。设计原则包括使用研究级技术和设备，鼓励团队探索和合作，并让学生学习通过跟踪信号（光学，电学等）调试实验。像研究人员一样进行实验。新实验室将为学生提供设计实验和探索结果的机会，提供足够的灵活性，使学生能够控制和反思实验的方向，并为学生提供机会，逐步进行更复杂的实验分析。改革后的实验将以合理的成本实施，并将包括完全开放的硬件和软件。研究人员将通过比较学生在实施更改之前和之后完成实验的表现和经验来评估改革实验的有效性。传统的物理实验室练习通常无法为学生提供真实的经验，以帮助他们发展解决问题，推理和高阶思维技能，并学会像物理学家一样思考。本项目拟开发的三个改造实验室（即，声学共振，穆斯堡尔光谱，噪音和过滤）将使用认知的方法来教学设计，并将考虑到学生的先验知识，以确定在探索和分析的给定阶段提供的支持水平。特别是，研究人员将采用实地测试的认知学徒模式，其中教师将模拟良好表现的标准，指导学生并提供适当水平的脚手架支持，然后减少支持，使学生在实验室的设计和探索中发展自力更生。在重新设计物理实验室练习中使用的原则，硬件和软件可以适用于重新设计其他STEM领域的实验。

Numerous reports from government and industry have called for colleges and universities to produce more -- and more capable -- STEM graduates. To attract more students to STEM fields, faculty need to make the curriculum more engaging and relevant. One important shift in instructional approach is to replace traditional laboratory courses with discovery-based courses, giving students exposure to research techniques and equipment. In this project, the investigators will employ a set of design principles to reform three lab experiments used in advanced physics lab courses. The design principles include using research-grade techniques and equipment, encouraging exploration and collaboration in teams, and having students learn to debug experiments by following signals (optical, electrical, etc.) through the experiments as a researcher would. The new labs will provide students an opportunity to design experiments and explore outcomes, provide sufficient flexibility so that students are challenged to take control and reflect upon the direction of the experiments, and provide students an opportunity to perform progressively more complex analyses of experiments. The reformed experiments will be implemented at a reasonable cost and will include completely open hardware and software. The investigators will assess the effectiveness of the reformed experiments by comparing the performance and experiences of students completing the experiments before and after the changes are implemented.Traditional physics lab exercises often do not provide students with authentic experiences to help them develop problem-solving, reasoning, and higher-order thinking skills and learn to think like a physicist. The three reformed labs to be developed in this project (i.e., acoustic resonance, Mossbauer spectroscopy, and noise and filtering) will use a cognitive approach to instructional design and will take into account students' prior knowledge in determining the level of support provided at a given stage of exploration and analysis. In particular, the investigators will apply a field-tested cognitive apprenticeship model in which the instructor will model the criteria of good performance, coach students and provide an appropriate level of scaffolding support, and then reduce the support so that the students develop self-reliance in the design and explorations in the labs. The principles, hardware, and software used in redesigning the physics lab exercises can be adapted to redesign experiments in other STEM fields.