Instructional Laboratory for Experimental Training (INLET)

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Numerous reports from government and industry have called for colleges and universities to produce more -- and more capable -- STEM graduates. To attract more students to STEM fields, faculty need to make the curriculum more engaging and relevant. One important shift in instructional approach is to replace traditional laboratory courses with discovery-based courses, giving students exposure to research techniques and equipment. In this project, the investigators will employ a set of design principles to reform three lab experiments used in advanced physics lab courses. The design principles include using research-grade techniques and equipment, encouraging exploration and collaboration in teams, and having students learn to debug experiments by following signals (optical, electrical, etc.) through the experiments as a researcher would. The new labs will provide students an opportunity to design experiments and explore outcomes, provide sufficient flexibility so that students are challenged to take control and reflect upon the direction of the experiments, and provide students an opportunity to perform progressively more complex analyses of experiments. The reformed experiments will be implemented at a reasonable cost and will include completely open hardware and software. The investigators will assess the effectiveness of the reformed experiments by comparing the performance and experiences of students completing the experiments before and after the changes are implemented. Traditional physics lab exercises often do not provide students with authentic experiences to help them develop problem-solving, reasoning, and higher-order thinking skills and learn to think like a physicist. The three reformed labs to be developed in this project (i.e., acoustic resonance, Mossbauer spectroscopy, and noise and filtering) will use a cognitive approach to instructional design and will take into account students' prior knowledge in determining the level of support provided at a given stage of exploration and analysis. In particular, the investigators will apply a field-tested cognitive apprenticeship model in which the instructor will model the criteria of good performance, coach students and provide an appropriate level of scaffolding support, and then reduce the support so that the students develop self-reliance in the design and explorations in the labs. The principles, hardware, and software used in redesigning the physics lab exercises can be adapted to redesign experiments in other STEM fields.