Investigating the landscape of physics laboratory instruction across North America

Physics lab instruction is evolving in response to changing technology, a desire to better prepare students for diverse careers, and renewed focus from physics education researchers. To prepare researchers to evaluate progress in instructional labs in the future, this study set out to understand the current state of instructional physics labs in North America. Using information collected from instructors intending to use two research-based lab assessments, we evaluate the reach, organization, goals, and pedagogies from over 200 unique instructional lab courses at over 100 institutions. We find significant diversity in all aspects evaluated, with some trends in course pedagogy based on course goals and level. Namely, courses that aim to reinforce concepts, develop lab skills, or do both incorporate varied levels of agency and modeling in their instruction, with differences in first year and beyond-first year courses. We hope these analyses will be useful for instructors to situate their own courses in the national landscape and for researchers to evaluate changes in lab instruction in the future.

Figure 1

Average frequency with which students engage in various activities in the lab courses (darker shading means more frequent and values are means $\pm$ standard errors). Instructors could select from never (1), rarely (2), sometimes (3), often (4), or always (5).

Figure 2

Number of weeks spent in FY- and BFY-level courses on guided lab activities or open-ended lab activities. Courses are also split out by the course goal (i.e., primary purpose). Instructors may have spent a single week on both guided and unguided activities, so we included only the raw data rather than normalizing by the total number of weeks.

Figure 3

Distribution of scores on the agency and modeling factors for courses broken out by course level and course goal. Higher factor scores indicate more frequent use of the items loaded on to that factor. The horizontal black lines indicate the means of each distribution.