Students’ dynamic engagement with experimental data in a physics laboratory setting

Abstract

Increased emphasis has been given to students' engagement with experimental data as reform efforts have continued to transform the landscape of introductory physics laboratory courses by providing greater opportunities for authentic scientific inquiry and student agency. As a result, students become the primary driving forces of their own experimentation, and the manner in which they engage with experimental data becomes more dynamic and nonlinear. This study presents ongoing efforts to illuminate the nuanced ways students enact various data-based actions when engaging in physics laboratory experiments. In this paper, we present a single case-study analysis of a student group engaging in an inquiry-based physics laboratory to highlight the dynamic and iterative ways the group shifts between multiple data-based actions when expected to be engaging in a single laboratory task. Research data comes from audio and video files of students' computers while they engaged in lab experimentation, coded using a constructivist grounded theory approach to identify multiple data-based actions performed by the students. Results of this case study show that students oftentimes shift between multiple data-based actions on short timescales and that these shifts can take place with implicit iterative patterns, even when the instructional setting is structured for a single experimental task.

Students’ productive strategies when generating graphical representations: An undergraduate laboratory case study

“…In this course, students are expected to generate research questions and conduct two-or three-week independent investigations with minimal direct instruction from teaching or learning assistants (TAs or LAs, respectively). This case study comes from a larger project investigating the nature of student engagement with experimental data in physics laboratory settings [37]. To identify this case study group, we reviewed previously collected research data, including: 1) observational data from student groups, which included screen capture, video, and audio data; 2) students' submitted pre-investigation design plans, where they outline their plans for conducting their investigations' and 3) students' individual lab reports.…”

“…Their experiment focused on testing a hypothesis that confined zebrafish are antisocial; this hypothesis relied on observations of an inverse relationship between fish swimming velocity and fish-to-fish (f2f ) distance (the closer two fish are to each other, the faster they will swim). Our analysis used screen-capture data collected from the group's Lab 1 investigation, which had been previously coded for instances when students engaged in various experimental actions, including creating and modifying representations [37]. Subsequent narrative analysis focused on truncating the group's investigation into natural excerpts where students discussed and enacted strategies to generate graphs.…”