Introductory Physics Labs at UGA
Sairam Tangirala and Craig Wiegert
An important aim of science curriculum is to help students understand scientific concepts and to prepare them for real-life applications. Its essential component being the promotion of scientific
approach leading to an ’understanding’ where students apprehend a particular scientific explanation as valid and also explain their scientific reasoning. In many science education practices, such
an understanding is often not be made explicit and students are encouraged to pick it from their experience of seeing practical demonstrations and participating in the experiments. Here, we
present our research findings on the belief of letting students to assimilate scientific concepts demonstrated in their weekly introductory Physics labs. We hope that our findings will help us in
understanding and quantifying learning in the physics labs.
1 Introduction
Introductory Physics Labs at UGA
At UGA, the Physics & Astronomy department pro-
vides 1-credit laboratory courses to science and engi-
neering students in conjunction with the theory classes.
These courses are offered in tandem to introduc-
tory level physics 3-credit courses. The laboratory
classes are designed to follow theory classes every week
throughout the semester. This we believe, provides
a good opportunity to undergraduate students to ex-
perience various class-taught physical principles in the
real-world scenario. It is hoped that learning from do-
ing experiments will promote active-learning via better
student involvement. Each lab class consists of a max-
imum of 40 students and typically 2 lab teaching as-
sistants (TA’s). Laboratory set-up inherently promotes
group work and interaction with TA’s.
2 Method Used
From two semesters’ data we find lab ID2 gets an aver-
age grade of around 60%. Other labs with avg. grades
around 70% are OL1 and MFM. We investigate the
possibility of restructuring such labs to improve their
effectiveness.
Weekly Surveys:
After each lab session students were given anonymous
surveys to provide feedback in following categories:
i. Lab manual clarity
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602
Abstract
ii. Their conceptual familarity with lab content
iii. Hands-on experience
iv. Post-lab questions
Grades of Lab Final Tests (note color code)
End Semester Surveys:
At semester end, students were asked about overall lab
section along with their rating of toughness and easy-
ness of individual labs.
Analysis:
Surveys were collected back before students left the lab
and data were analyzed to get insights about students
learning in all labs. Efforts were made to identify fac-
tors that determine the effectiveness of individual labs.
Surveys Snapshots
The surveys were passed out after each lab session and
were kept anonymous to encourage candid feedback.
After the surveys, students were encouraged to fill-in
a post-lab quiz that was designed to test their concep-
tual understanding of the physics concepts covered in
the lab.
The grades from the post-lab quizes were used to eval-
uate students understanding immediately after the lab
session. The post-lab grades were compared against
the final test grades to assess the retention of the learnt
concepts.
A comparison of post-lab and final test grades indi-
cates that for most of the labs students score lower in
1 to acknowledge an understanding of more than 70% of
post-lab questions. This indicates that immediately
after the lab session students are not quite comfort-
able with new questions pertaining to the concepts
covered in the lab. However during the final tests,
students seem to prepare well for the test and score
better. Also, the assignments, tests, etc., of the the-
ory class might be helping in learning the concepts.
Post-Lab & Final Test Grade Comparison
The above right plot shows that lab ID2, OL1, and
MFM get an average score around 70%. More atten-
tion is needed in OL1, OL2, and MFM labs where
post-lab question grades are unacceptable (¿50%).
This low score in post-lab performance is carried
onto the final test grades also. Care needs to be
taken to ensure that students learn the concepts
and are well equipped to solve any questions con-
taining the concepts of ID2, OL1, OL2, and MFM.
Students Perceived Learning after Class
From student’s point of view, it appears students seem
the concepts covered in all the labs. But, in fact the
final test grades do not reflect this trend. An overes-
timating of students conceptual understanding might
be resulting from lack of challenging questions in the
lab, passive learning, mechanically following the lab
manual. TA interaction and lab manual can help by
arousing curiosity, asking counter-intuitive, thought-
provoking, and challenging questions during lab.
Other Factors: Lab Manual & Hands-on Work
Final test grades
Lab manual feedback
Lab−class feedback
For all labs the success of lab manual is found to be con-
sistently below the other components including group
work, TA. interactions. The labs RR and OL2 have a
lower score on in-lab learning which can be improved.
Identifying the Difficult Labs
Conclusions: Students feedback in Physics lab were ex-
amined to study lab’s effectiveness.
Acknowledgements: S.T thanks Daniel Seaton and
Adam Schneider in helping with this work.
(Work done in June 2010)