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Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students' experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices,…
A thoughtful approach to designing and improving labs, particularly at the advanced level, is critical for the effective preparation of physics majors for professional work in industry or graduate school. With that in mind, physics…
Physics laboratory courses have been generally acknowledged as an important component of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly with respect to developing students' interest in, and understanding of, experimental physics. There are a…
Favorable outcomes from ongoing research at the University of Colorado Boulder on student learning in junior-level electrostatics (E&M I) have led us to extend this work to upper-division electrodynamics (E&M II). We describe here our…
Building on successful work on studying and transforming our senior-level Advanced Lab course, we have transformed our junior-level Electronics course to engage students in a variety of authentic scientific practices, including…
Student learning in instructional physics labs is a growing area of research that includes studies exploring students' beliefs and expectations about experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies about experimental…
The ability to develop, use, and refine models of experimental systems is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. However, no assessments of students' model-based reasoning exist for upper-division…
In this exploratory qualitative study, we describe instructors' self-reported practices for teaching and assessing students' ability to troubleshoot in electronics lab courses. We collected audio data from interviews with 20 electronics…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
Improving students' understanding of the nature of experimental physics is often an explicit or implicit goal of undergraduate laboratory physics courses. However, lab activities in traditional lab courses are typically characterized by…
In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments…
The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) was developed as a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. At the beginning and end of the semester, the E-CLASS…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
Student learning in undergraduate physics laboratory courses has garnered increased attention within the PER community. Considerable work has been done to develop curricular materials and pedagogical techniques designed to enhance student…
Recently, there has been increased attention to improving laboratory instruction at all levels. At the introductory level, research results have shown differing levels of success based on the nature of the desired learning outcomes. In…
Laboratory courses represent a unique and potentially important component of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which can be designed to allow students to authentically engage with the process of experimental physics. Among other…
The increasing availability of digital tools for education offers significant opportunities to enhance teaching practices and student engagement. This study presents a structured categorization of online educational tools based on their…
We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but…
To enhance the undergraduate and graduate engineering education for nanoscale materials, devices and systems, we report a multi-disciplinary course based on the integration of theory, hands-on laboratory and hands-on computation into a…
When education researchers describe newly developed curricular materials, they typically concentrate on the research base behind their design, and the efficacy of the final products, but do not highlight the initial stages of creating the…