Measuring the Impact of Introductory Physics Labs on Learning

TL;DR

This study investigated whether a modified introductory physics lab focusing on modeling and data analysis impacts exam performance, finding no significant effect despite curriculum changes.

Contribution

It provides evidence that adding modeling and data analysis activities to physics labs does not significantly influence exam outcomes.

Findings

No impact on exam performance from modified labs

Curriculum changes did not improve learning outcomes

Reinforcement labs also showed no effect

Abstract

Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 1% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a modified version of one of these lab courses whose goals also included modeling, designing experiments, and analyzing and visualizing data. This modified course used the same sets of apparatus as the previous version, but changed the pre-lab and in-lab activities to focus on developing and testing models with data. The study evaluated the impact of these additional goals and activities. We found that they did not affect students' performance on the final exam.