Instructing nontraditional physics labs: Toward responsiveness to student epistemic framing

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Research on nontraditional laboratory (lab) activities in physics shows that students often expect to verify predetermined results, as takes place in traditional lab activities. This understanding of what is taking place, or epistemic framing, may impact students’ behaviors in the lab, either productively or unproductively. In this paper, we present an analysis of student epistemic framing in a nontraditional lab with the aim of understanding how instructional context, specifically instructor behaviors, may shape student framing. We present video data from a lab section taught by an experienced teaching assistant (TA), with 19 students working in seven groups. We argue that student framing in this lab is evidenced by whether or not students articulate experimental predictions and by the extent to which they take up cognitive authority when constructing knowledge (epistemic agency). We show that the TA’s attempts to shift student frames generally succeed with respect to experimental predictions but are less successful with respect to epistemic agency. In part, we suggest, the success of the TA’s attempts reflects whether and how they are responsive to students’ current framing. This work offers evidence that instructors can shift students’ frames in nontraditional labs, while also illuminating the complexities of both student framing and the role of the instructor in shifting that framing in this context.

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Figure 1

Theoretical framework for this study. The instructional context encompasses components of the lab learning environment, including the written lab instructions, the instructor’s intentions for teaching the lab, and the instructor’s behaviors during the lab. The instructional context interacts with student epistemic framing, their expectations for what is taking place with regard to knowledge construction. This framing manifests in students’ predictions for their experimental result and the extent to which they enact authority over knowledge construction (epistemic agency). Our main goal is to characterize the relationship between instructor behaviors and student framing (green arrow).

Figure 2

The written lab instructions provided to students and the instructor for the mechanism testing activity.

Figure 3

Definitions of and observed behaviors corresponding to students’ epistemic frames identified from the video analysis. Frames are shown along two dimensions—predictions and epistemic agency—in line with our theoretical framework (see Fig. 1). Students were rarely in the Discovery frame (see Fig. 4), therefore we did not observe many behaviors corresponding to this frame. Instead, we propose hypothesized behaviors based on our observations of the High Agency-Confirmation and High Agency-Falsification frames.

Figure 4

Timeline figure depicting student and instructor framing (defined in Fig. 3) over time during the mechanism testing activity. Two simultaneous colors (i.e., in group C) indicate that individual students in the same group are in different frames. The start time for every group (0 min mark) corresponds to when they start discussing the activity and the end time corresponds to when the group finishes the activity and leaves the room (hence the different lengths of time in each group and the apparent overlap of instructor interactions).