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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…
Troubleshooting systems is integral to experimental physics in both research and instructional laboratory settings. The recently adopted AAPT Lab Guidelines identify troubleshooting as an important learning outcome of the undergraduate…
We explore the overlap of two nationally-recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are…
Students in physics laboratory courses, particularly at the upper division, are often expected to engage in troubleshooting. Although there are numerous ways in which students may proceed when diagnosing a problem, not all approaches are…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
The objectives of physics laboratory courses include fostering conceptual understanding and development of several important cognitive, psycho-motor, attitudinal and affective abilities. In most of the Indian colleges and universities (and…
Design and scientific investigation are recognized as key components of undergraduate physics laboratory curricula. In light of this, many successful lab programs have been developed to train students to develop these abilities, and…
Introductory courses on electric circuits at undergraduate level are usually presented in quite abstract terms, with questions and problems quite far from practical problems. This causes the students have difficulties to apply that theory…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
An assumed attribute of expert physicists is that they learn readily from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they have had access to a correct…
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how a clinical interview protocol with failure artifact scenarios can capture changes in high school students' explanations of troubleshooting processes in physical computing activities. We…
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 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…
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…
Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students'…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…