Developing skills versus reinforcing concepts in physics labs: Insight from a survey of students’ beliefs about experimental physics

Physics laboratory courses have been generally acknowledged as an important component of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly with respect to developing students’ interest in, and understanding of, experimental physics. There are a number of possible learning goals for these courses including reinforcing physics concepts, developing laboratory skills, and promoting expertlike beliefs about the nature of experimental physics. However, there is little consensus among instructors and researchers interested in the laboratory learning environment as to the relative importance of these various learning goals. Here, we contribute data to this debate through the analysis of students’ responses to the laboratory-focused assessment known as the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Using a large, national data set of students’ responses, we compare students’ E-CLASS performance in classes in which the instructor self-reported focusing on developing skills, reinforcing concepts, or both. As the classification of courses was based on instructor self-report, we also provide additional description of these courses with respect to how often students engage in particular activities in the lab. We find that courses that focus specifically on developing lab skills have more expertlike postinstruction E-CLASS responses than courses that focus either on reinforcing physics concepts or on both goals. Within first-year courses, this effect is larger for women. Moreover, these findings hold when controlling for the variance in postinstruction scores that is associated with preinstruction E-CLASS scores, student major, and student gender.

Figure 1

Visual representation of pre- to postinstruction shifts in E-CLASS scores from all courses in the data set, as well as for the FY and BFY courses individually. Differences in the pre- and postinstruction score distributions are statistically significant in all cases except for those of the BFY students in the concepts-focused and both-focused courses.

Figure 2

Sorted plot of the difference between the average scores (points) of FY students in skills-focused and concepts-focused courses for each item of the E-CLASS. Zero difference is marked by the solid horizontal line. Filled markers indicate points for which the difference between the distributions was statistically significant (Mann-Whitney U [24] and Holm-Bonferroni [32] corrected $p<0.05$). See Ref. [33] for full list of item prompts.