Restructuring physics labs to cultivate sense of student agency

Instructional physics labs offer students unique opportunities to develop an understanding of experimentation. By transforming labs to be more open ended and experimentation focused, instructors can better support student agency and choice. In this study, we examine students’ overall sense of and perceptions about agency in two experimentation-focused labs: one course primarily taken by physics majors and another course primarily taken by engineering majors. We compare the sense of and perceptions about agency between the different courses and between men and women in each course. Between the start and the end of the semester, we found a positive shift in students’ sense of agency in the lab activities in both courses, with no difference between men’s and women’s shifts. Additionally, we found empirical evidence that the majority of the students preferred the final, most open-ended Project lab. Our qualitative analysis revealed that most of the students perceived the opportunities for agency positively, citing “freedom” as their reason for preferring the Project lab. Both women and men in the course for engineering majors showed similar patterns. Fewer women in the physics majors course, however, chose the final project lab as their favorite and less often attributed their preference to freedom. We discuss possible interpretations of these results and implications for instruction.

Figure 1

The diagram shows the timeline of the lab units in the courses. Available student agency increases and structure decreases as students proceed from lab unit 1 to lab unit 4 (Project lab).

Figure 2

Raincloud plot [62] presents the shift in students’ sense of agency scores from pre- to post-test by gender in two physics courses with the same lab curricula. The box plot indicates the median, interquartile range, and the full range of scores. The figure also includes the mean and standard errors, with dotted lines indicating the shift in the mean sense of agency by gender.

Figure 3

Physics and engineering students’ reasoning to their preferred lab unit as a percentage across gender, course, and favorite lab. For example, the first bar in the top left quadrant indicates, of the women in the engineering course who preferred project lab, the percentage of their explanations that were coded as freedom versus the other codes.

Figure 4

Coding results of physics and engineering students’ reasoning to their preferred lab unit. Students’ responses could be coded under multiple reasoning categories.

Figure 5

Wordclouds show the most frequently used word for students’ open-ended responses to why they liked a particular lab unit in the majors (left) and engineering (right) course. Freedom is the most frequently written word.