Dynamics of Productive Confirmation Framing in an Introductory Lab

TL;DR

This paper explores how students' expectations to confirm textbook physics results can either hinder or promote productive engagement and scientific practices in introductory labs, depending on the context.

Contribution

It reveals the nuanced role of confirmatory expectations, showing they can foster epistemic agency and disciplinary practices when students encounter unexpected results.

Findings

Confirmatory expectations can support troubleshooting and original idea development.

Students' epistemological framing influences their engagement and disciplinary practices.

Expectations can both hinder and promote learning depending on context.

Abstract

In introductory physics laboratory instruction, students often expect to confirm or demonstrate textbook physics concepts (Wilcox & Lewandowski, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2018). This expectation is largely undesirable: labs that emphasize confirmation of textbook physics concepts are unsuccessful at teaching those concepts (Wieman & Holmes, 2015; Holmes et al., 2017) and even in contexts that don't emphasize confirmation, such expectations can lead to students disregarding or manipulating their data in order to obtain the expected result (Smith et al., 2020). In other words, when students expect their lab activities to confirm a known result, they may relinquish epistemic agency and violate disciplinary practices. We claim that, in other cases, confirmatory expectations can actually support productive disciplinary engagement. In particular, when an expected result is not confirmed, students may enter a productive "troubleshooting" mode (Smith et al., 2020). We analyze the complex dynamics of students' epistemological framing in a lab where student's confirmatory expectations support and even generate epistemic agency and disciplinary practices, including developing original ideas, measures, and apparatuses to apply to the material world.