Developing scientific decision making by structuring and supporting student agency

Scientific expertise is manifested through extensive cycles of making and acting on decisions. To learn the processes and practices of science, therefore, students must have practice with scientific decision making. We argue that this can only happen if students are afforded agency: the opportunity to make decisions to pursue a goal. In this study, we compared two different introductory physics labs through the lens of structuring and supporting student agency. We explore both the role of decision making agency (students are afforded opportunities to make decisions about their lab investigations) and epistemic agency (students are afforded opportunities to generate knowledge). We found that the two labs differed in both the amount and type of structure provided to students: one lab (the intervention condition), with more overall structure, cued student decision making; the other lab (control condition), with less overall structure, made decisions for students. Students in the intervention condition documented, on average, ten times more decisions during their investigations, including more unprompted decisions. In contrast, in labs with less available epistemic agency (i.e., labs where they had to verify or demonstrate canonical models or constants), students in the intervention condition documented fewer decisions than in labs with more available epistemic agency. We associate the improved decision making with students taking up personal agency, based on significant shifts in students’ tone as they described their experimental methods (from passive, third-person narratives to active, first-person narratives). Students in the intervention condition also made higher-quality decisions in line with scientific practice. The study speaks to the important nuances between structure and agency in instructional labs and tests the generalizability of previous research on lab instruction to a two-year college population.

Figure 1

Example text from a traditional lab. Bolded statement are examples of structure that limits students’ decision making agency while italicized statements are examples of structure that limits students’ epistemic agency.

Figure 2

Summary of the timing and types of labs throughout the courses. In verification labs, student investigations aimed to verify (demonstrate) a particular phenomenon or obtain a particular result (such as an estimate for acceleration due to gravity), implying low available epistemic agency. In evaluation labs, student investigations did not have any intended outcomes and students often had to collect data to evaluate multiple plausible models, implying high available epistemic agency.

Figure 3

The number of agency-based decisions provided in the instructions across labs and conditions. The instructions either made decisions for the students (given) or cued students to make decisions (cued). The instructions in the control condition made many planning decisions for the students, but provided little structure for executing and reflecting. The instructions in the intervention condition had more structure overall, but this structure was almost exclusively in the form of cues and the structure was faded over time.

Figure 4

Average number of coded decisions per group across labs, conditions, and lab types. The error bars represent the standard errors of the means. The horizontal lines indicate the condition average across labs. The lab activity labels associated with each lab week are indicated along the $x$ axis.

Figure 5

The fraction of students who wrote their lab methods in various tones (either third-person narratives as instructions to someone else or first-person narratives as descriptions of what they did in the past or of what they will do in the future) across labs and conditions. By weeks six and seven, the fraction of students describing what they will do differs by a factor of 10 between conditions, suggesting personal agency in the intervention condition.