Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2018
Volume 63, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 5–9, 2018; Los Angeles, California
Session C43: Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory InstructionInvited Prize/Award
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Sponsoring Units: FED Chair: Laurence Cain, Davidson Coll Room: LACC 503 |
Monday, March 5, 2018 2:30PM - 3:06PM |
C43.00001: Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction Talk: A Project-based Lab Course Experience at the University of Minnesota Invited Speaker: Kurt Wick A vital component of the advanced lab course at the University of Minnesota is the 10-week experimental project. The experiments are inspired by either students’ own ideas and interests, from a list of previous projects to be improved, or from recently published articles To be approved, an experiment must be based on a prediction or model of its outcome and have some component of design and construction. Students, typically working in pairs, start from scratch by building or assembling the components of their experimental setup. In addition to the technical component, the course is communication intensive with written reports (weekly progress reports, a peer reviewed proposal, and a final report) as well as oral presentations (15 minute talk, weekly meetings, and a poster session.) In a typical year faculty, which are co-teaching this course with staff, supervise 25 projects. This talk highlights the strengths and difficulties of this approach from the perspective of someone who has worked on the course for 29 years. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 3:06PM - 3:42PM |
C43.00002: Revitalizing Upper-Level Laboratory Instruction: Opportunities and Initiatives Invited Speaker: Elizabeth George Laboratory instruction has a central role in developing undergraduate students’ physics knowledge and experimental skills, in addition to transferable skills such as design, troubleshooting, innovation, and communication. But upper-level physics laboratory instruction is under stress, with financial challenges, significant demands on time and knowledge needed to keep curriculum and equipment up to date, and the frequent isolation of advanced lab instructors. The Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA) is a professional organization for those involved with upper-level lab instruction. ALPhA partners with equipment manufacturers, professional organizations, and foundations to generate funding, leverage access to equipment, and provide opportunities to share knowledge and build community. Among the opportunities offered by ALPhA are the Laboratory Immersions, multi-day workshops providing intensive hands-on experience with high-quality experiments. ALPhA also organizes national conferences on Laboratory Instruction Beyond the First Year; the next conference (“BFY3”) will be held at Loyola University Maryland in July 2018. I will discuss these and other opportunities, and will also invite comments and suggestions about current needs and possible future initiatives. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 3:42PM - 4:18PM |
C43.00003: Designing Advanced Labs: From Summer or Capstone Research Project(s) to Curricular Offering Invited Speaker: Enrique Galvez It all starts with the thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a lab about X (and along the way learn more about it)? The driver is the curiosity to figure out the phenomenon and the desire to show how beautiful a demonstration it would be. With this commitment and some resources we begin with …a student project. After a long road (several summer or capstone projects, dead ends, and luck), we get to: hey it’s a lab after all! How the students learn about it also teaches us how to better teach it. Our experience with correlated/entangled photon labs has been as much fun to learn from them (much of it unanticipated), as it was to reach the objective of developing a curricular offering. We currently offer a laboratory for upper-level quantum mechanics based on these photon experiments. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 4:18PM - 4:54PM |
C43.00004: Garage Physics: Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset in a physics lab Invited Speaker: Duncan Carlsmith An entrepreneurial mindset entails curiosity, self-direction, innovative thinking, and a willingness to accept measured risk of failure. It entails perhaps foremost an ability to see any problem as a challenge and opportunity. Developed, the entrepreneurial mindset entails skills in empirical hypothesis testing, planning, analysis, collaboration, and communication, all in a complex environment. These qualities are associated with a successful undergraduate in an advanced laboratory course or capstone research experience in physics as much as with a successful undergraduate CEO launching a technology start-up. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 4:54PM - 5:30PM |
C43.00005: Hands-on or minds-on? Teaching and measuring critical thinking in labs Invited Speaker: N Holmes The goals of lab courses have been highly debated for decades with not much research to back up any position. Recent work has suggested that, given the resources that go into them, labs are not efficient for reinforcing conceptual understanding. In this talk, I will describe new research into the goals of lab courses, especially how they can be used to developing critical thinking skills. I will also discuss how we are designing ways to measure student progress towards those goals, and the efficacy of different approaches for achieving them. |
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