Investigating students’ views of experimental physics in German laboratory classes

There is a large variety of goals instructors have for laboratory courses, with different courses focusing on different subsets of goals. An often implicit, but crucial, goal is to develop students’ attitudes, views, and expectations about experimental physics to align with practicing experimental physicists. The assessment of laboratory courses upon this one dimension of learning has been intensively studied in U.S. institutions using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). However, there is no such an instrument available to use in Germany, and the influence of laboratory courses on students views about the nature of experimental physics is still unexplored at German-speaking institutions. Motivated by the lack of an assessment tool to investigate this goal in laboratory courses at German-speaking institutions, we present a translated version of the E-CLASS adapted to the context at German-speaking institutions. We call the German version of the E-CLASS, the GE-CLASS. We describe the translation process and the creation of an automated web-based system for instructors to assess their laboratory courses. We also present first results using GE-CLASS obtained at the University of Potsdam. A first comparison between E-CLASS and GE-CLASS results shows clear differences between University of Potsdam and U.S. students’ views and beliefs about experimental physics.

Figure 1

Overall GE-CLASS agreement with experts for the pre- and post-tests. Perfect agreement with experts corresponds to one, zero means no agreement with experts. In red are the GE-CLASS results for YOU questions and in blue for the EXPERT questions. For comparison, E-CLASS results are indicated in the figure as well (in dark and light gray). The overall mean shown here averages over all students and all items on the survey. Error bars are standard deviations of the mean.

Figure 2

Fraction of responses that agree with the ER for each item of the survey. Squares indicate the mean for the pre-instruction responses for YOU-question (red) and EXPERT-question (blue) views. Black and gray squares are the E-CLASS preinstruction responses for YOU-question and EXPERT-question view, respectively. Shaded bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals of the preinstruction fraction. These intervals are not visible for E-CLASS results since they are smaller than the data point symbols. The end of the arrows indicate the postinstruction agreement with experts. Note the questions in the figure are ordered according to the preinstruction personal views for the GE-CLASS data.

Figure 3

Overall agreement with the ER for YOU questions, item by item, before and after instruction for E-CLASS (top graph) and for the GE-CLASS (lower graph). The results are obtained using a 3-point scoring method (left axis). Stars indicate pre-post changes that are statistically significant, as obtained by using the Mann-Whitney U-test. The absolute values of the Cohen’s $d$ are also indicated in the figure as bars for the items with a statistically significant change after instruction (right axis).

Figure 4

Cumulative distribution of the agreement with experts as a function of total GE- and E-CLASS score for pre- and post-tests in (a) for YOU questions and (b) for EXPERT questions. The reached total score has been calculated using a 3-point data analysis (see text for more information).