Open-ended versus guided laboratory activities:Impact on students’ beliefs about experimental physics

Abstract

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 highly structured, guided labs that often do not require or encourage students to engage authentically in the process of experimental physics. Alternatively, open-ended laboratory activities can provide a more authentic learning environment by, for example, allowing students to exercise greater autonomy in what and how physical phenomena are investigated. Engaging in authentic practices may be a critical part of improving students' beliefs around the nature of experimental physics. Here, we investigate the impact of open-ended activities in undergraduate lab courses on students' epistemologies and expectations about the nature of experimental physics, as well as their confidence and affect, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Using a national data set of student responses to the E-CLASS, we find that the inclusion of some open-ended lab activities in a lab course correlates with more expert-like postinstruction responses relative to courses that include only traditional guided lab activities. This finding holds when examining postinstruction E-CLASS scores while controlling for the variance associated with preinstruction scores, course level, student major, and student gender.

Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content

“…Another possible claim is that the lab increases student motivation, which then is reflected in improved overall course performance. Studies of both concepts-based and structured lab courses, however, have shown that student attitudes and motivation towards experimental physics decrease by the end of such courses [15,27]. Regardless of whether the learning in the lab leads to improved learning in other aspects of the course, what we have shown is that these labs are not…”

“…Research has shown that even small elements of open endedness in activities can improve student attitudes towards experimental physics [15]. Providing students with time, opportunity, and incentive to revise, troubleshoot, or explore by, for example, spreading a single lab experiment across multiple weeks may enable the desired skills focus [34,45].…”

“…The researchers compared the responses of students based on the structures of the lab courses in which they were enrolled. They found that students' perceptions of experimental physics became less expertlike in courses that were more guided compared with ones with open-ended activities [15] and in ones whose primary goals included focus on developing or reinforcing physics concepts compared with ones that focused on skills [27].…”

“…Recent work probing students' attitudes towards and beliefs about experimental physics have raised concerns about this goal [15,27]. In these two studies, almost 5000 students in over 100 courses at 67 different institutions were surveyed at the start and end of a physics lab course about several aspects of experimental physics.…”

“…As curricular requirements became more rigid (to meet college entrance requirements, for example) and enrollment numbers increased, discovery lab activities inevitably evolved to become more structured, leading to well defined experiment protocols [2], derogatorily referred to as "cookbook." These overly structured labs have been criticized for stifling students' use of cognitive and metacognitive skills [4,12,13], impeding students' epistemologies regarding the nature of experimentation and scientific measurement [14][15][16], and being generally "uninspiring" [17]. Nonetheless, step-by-step verification and confirmation labs remain the norm at many institutions, often to satisfy conceptual physics goals by ensuring students will obtain the "right" answer [5,12].…”