When
you ask physicists to reflect on their intro labs, responses include
“boring”, “forgettable”, or “cookbook.”
Enthusiastic responses usually come from students whose courses were
non-traditional: they got to design their own experiments, build their
own equipment, or choose their own topics. Across institutions, there
has been little consensus on the goals and structures
of lab courses with not much research to back up any position. Until
now. In this talk, I will describe new research into the goals of lab
courses, how we are measuring student progress towards those goals, and
the efficacy of different approaches for achieving
them. We’ll discuss some tactics for using intro labs to teach
experimentation and critical thinking skills, some examples of labs, and
some new research on different ways of implementing them.