Development and evaluation of a tutorial to improve students’ understanding of a lock-in amplifier

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 possible benefits, participation in these courses throughout the undergraduate physics curriculum presents an opportunity to develop students' understanding of the nature and importance of experimental physics within the discipline as a whole. Here, we present and compare both a longitudinal and pseudo-longitudinal analysis of students' responses to a research-based assessment targeting students' views about experimental physics -the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) -across multiple, required lab courses at a single institution. We find that, while pseudo-longitudinal averages showed increases in students' E-CLASS scores in each consecutive course, analysis of longitudinal data indicates that this increase was not driven by a cumulative impact of laboratory instruction. Rather, the increase was driven by a selection effect in which students who persisted into higher-level lab courses already had more expert-like beliefs, attitudes, and expectations than their peers when they started the lower-level courses.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvement or selection? A longitudinal analysis of students’ views about experimental physics in their lab courses

Wilcox

Lewandowski

2017

“…However, over the last decade, PER researchers have expanded their studies into upper-division courses (e.g., Refs. [3][4][5][6]), and, most importantly for the current work, into the laboratory domain [7][8][9]. Thus, investigations of student learning in lab courses represent a frontier subfield of PER.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ views about the nature of experimental physics

Wilcox

Lewandowski

2017

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 of the field. However, while student learning within lecture courses has been the subject of extensive research, lab courses remain relatively understudied. In particular, there is little, if any, data available that addresses the effectiveness of physics lab courses at encouraging students to recognize the nature and importance of experimental physics within the discipline as a whole. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale, national study (Ninstitutions = 75 and N students = 7167) of undergraduate physics lab courses through analysis of students' responses to a research-validated assessment designed to investigate students' beliefs about the nature of experimental physics. We find that students often enter and leave physics lab courses with ideas about experimental physics as practiced in their courses that are inconsistent with the views of practicing experimental physicists, and this trend holds at both the introductory and upper-division levels. Despite this inconsistency, we find that both introductory and upperdivision students are able to accurately predict the expert-like response even in cases where their views about experimentation in their lab courses disagree. These finding have implications for the recruitment, retention, and adequate preparation of students in physics.

“…Each initial draft was revised several times based on interviews with introductory physics students and feedback from graduate students and several professors who were asked to work through them and provide feedback to ensure that they were comfortable with the wording of the sub-problems and progression of the tutorial. During this revision process, the fine-tuned versions of the tutorials were implemented in one-on-one think aloud [50] interviews with introductory physics students and were shown to improve student performance on the paired problems that were developed in parallel with the tutorials.…”

Section: Development Validation and Structure Of The Tutorialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Holistic framework to help students learn effectively from research-validated self-paced learning tools

Marshman

DeVore

Singh

2020

Self Cite

With limited time available in the classroom, e-learning tools can supplement in-class learning by providing opportunities for students to study and learn outside of class. Such tools can be especially helpful for students who lack adequate prior preparation. However, one critical issue is ensuring that students, especially those in need of additional help, engage with the tools as intended. Here we first discuss an empirical investigation in which students in a large algebra-based physics course were given opportunities to work through research-validated tutorials outside of class as self-study tools. Students were provided these optional tutorials after traditional instruction in relevant topics and were then given quizzes that included problems that were identical to the tutorial problems with regard to the physics principles involved but had different contexts. We find that students who worked through the tutorials as self-study tools struggled to transfer their learning to solve problems that used the same physics principles. On the other hand, students who worked on the tutorials in supervised, one-on-one situations performed significantly better than them. These empirical findings suggest that many introductory physics students may not engage effectively with selfpaced learning tools unless they are provided additional incentives and support, e.g., to aid with self-regulation. Inspired by the empirical findings, we propose a holistic theoretical framework to help create learning environments in which students with diverse backgrounds are provided support to engage effectively with self-study tools.