Developing skills vs reinforcing concepts in physics labs: Insight from E-CLASS

TL;DR

This study analyzes how focusing on developing laboratory skills versus reinforcing physics concepts in undergraduate labs affects students' attitudes, finding that skill-focused courses lead to more expert-like beliefs, especially for women.

Contribution

It provides large-scale, empirical evidence that emphasizing lab skills improves students' attitudes towards experimental physics, with notable gender differences.

Findings

Skill-focused courses yield more expert-like attitudes.

Gender differences favor women in skill-focused courses.

Results hold after controlling for pretest scores and demographics.

Abstract

Physics laboratory courses have been generally acknowledged as an important component of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly with respect to developing students' interest in, and understanding of, experimental physics. There are a number of possible learning goals for these courses including reinforcing physics concepts, developing laboratory skills, and promoting expert-like beliefs about the nature of experimental physics. However, there is little consensus among instructors and researchers interested in the laboratory learning environment as to relative importance of these various learning goals. Here, we contribute data to this debate through the analysis of students' responses to the laboratory-focused assessment known as the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Using a large, national data set of students' responses, we compare students' E-CLASS performance in classes in which the instructor self-reported focusing on developing skills, reinforcing concepts, or both. As the classification of courses was based on instructor self-report, we also provide additional description of these course with respect to how often students engage in particular activities in the lab. We find that courses that focus specifically on developing lab skills have more expert-like postinstruction E-CLASS responses than courses that focus either on reinforcing physics concepts or on both goals. Within first-year courses, this effect is larger for women. Moreover, these findings hold when controlling for the variance in postinstruction scores that is associated with preinstruction E-CLASS score, student major, and student gender.