A framework for designing experimental tasks in contemporary physics lab courses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a research-informed framework to guide the design of experimental tasks in physics lab courses, aiming to improve their effectiveness and align with educational goals.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for designing physics lab tasks and demonstrates its application within a European project to develop high-quality experiments.

Findings

Framework helps characterize existing experimental tasks

Framework guides development of new high-quality tasks

Application within DigiPhysLab project shows practical utility

Abstract

While lab courses are an integral part of studying physics aiming at a huge variety of learning objectives, research has shown that typical lab courses do not reach all the desired goals. While diverse approaches by lab instructors and researchers try to increase the effectiveness of lab courses, experimental tasks remain the core of any lab course. To keep an overview of these developments and to give instructors (and researchers) a guideline for their own professional efforts at hand, we introduce a research-informed framework for designing experimental tasks in contemporary physics lab courses. In addition, we demonstrate within the scope of the EU-co-funded DigiPhysLab-project how the framework can be used to characterize existing or develop new high-quality experimental tasks for physics lab courses.