Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session G07: Engaging Students in Authentic Experimentation During Lab CoursesEducation Invited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Rebecca Lindell, Tiliadal STEM Education Room: Sheraton Governor's Square 16 |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 8:30AM - 9:06AM |
G07.00001: Project-based learning in a BYU laboratory course Invited Speaker: Nathan David Powers In order to align the physics labs curriculum at Brigham Young University with AAPT recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum, we have been restructuring our lab courses to be project-based, as opposed to concept-focused. Project-based labs offer unique opportunities to engage students in a wide array of cognitive tasks that are important to experimental physics, such as establishing goals, designing experiments, and analyzing results. While project-based labs more naturally incorporate these tasks, instructors can enhance the effectiveness of a course by identifying a subset of tasks and designing the course to target the skills necessary to achieve them. I will discuss our approach to implementing project-based labs into our courses. As an example, I will describe a course that focuses on teaching students how to establish research goals, define criteria, and assess feasibility. The course structure provides multiple opportunities for peer and instructor feedback as students develop their ideas. The feedback process mirrors authentic practices within the scientific community and has resulted in significant improvements in both the success rate and quality of student-designed projects and presentations. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 9:06AM - 9:42AM |
G07.00002: Exploring student learning in design- and project-based laboratory courses Invited Speaker: Bei Cai The physics department at Queen's University in Canada has embarked on a journey to transform its advanced undergraduate laboratory courses using a holistic backward design approach. Student learning activities and course assessments have been redeveloped to align with a common set of learning objectives adapted from the AAPT recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum. Our main focus has been to shift the traditional prescribed lab courses to be more design- and project-based. We have been measuring the effectiveness of this shift by employing a set of educational research tools including observing students in the labs, evaluating student learning in their assignments, and surveying students on their experimental strategies. I will talk about the various strategies we employed in transforming our 2nd, 3rd and 4th year lab courses. I will showcase our research findings of the effect of these changes on student learning. These include qualitative data analysis of student reflections on their project experience as well as audio recordings comparing students performing prescribed versus design-based experiments. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 9:42AM - 10:18AM |
G07.00003: Identifying teaching practices that foster project ownership in physics labs Invited Speaker: Laura Ríos Physics laboratory courses are unique learning environments wherein students can learn facility with equipment, troubleshooting techniques, and written communication, and they are socialized in the profession of physics. In our three-year project, physics education researchers have partnered with upper-division physics laboratory course instructors at multiple institutions to identify how instructors align their teaching and mentoring practices with the learning goals for their courses. In this talk, I will discuss how the PER team uses and creates education research tools to learn how students develop a sense of ownership over their final projects. Our data collection includes qualitative interviewing techniques such as the Life Grid method, and quantitative assessments of courses using the Project Ownership Survey. I will present the current status of the project and briefly discuss the theorization of the construct of ownership in project-based physics lab courses. |
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