While understanding laboratory equipment is an important learning goal of physics laboratory (lab) instruction, previous studies have found inequities as to who gets to use equipment in in-person lab classes. With the transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, class dynamics changed and the effects on equipment usage remain unclear. As part of a larger effort to make intro physics labs more equitable, we investigated student equipment usage based on gender and race in two introductory physics lab courses, one taught in-person and one taught remotely.

Numerous studies have identified gender inequity in how students divide roles in lab courses. Few studies, however, have probed how these inequities impact women’s experimental physics identity development. In this work, we used closed-response surveys to investigate which lab tasks students view as part of “doing physics” and how these designations varied by gender. In both courses, we found that most students viewed working with the experimental apparatus, taking lab notes, doing data analysis, and thinking about the physics theory behind the experiment as part of doing physics.

Research has shown that students in inquiry-based physics labs often expect their experiment to verify a known theory or model, contrary to the goals of the lab. It is important, therefore, to identify ways for instructors to shift students’ expectations or epistemic frames to those in line with scientific inquiry. In this paper, we analyze video recordings of one inquiry-based lab session in which the instructor intentionally encourages students to falsify, or disprove, the claim under investigation.

Critical thinking is the process by which people make decisions about what to trust and what to do. Many undergraduate courses, such as those in biology and physics, include critical thinking as an important learning goal. Assessing critical thinking, however, is non-trivial, with mixed recommendations for how to assess critical thinking as part of instruction. Here we evaluate the efficacy of assessment questions to probe students' critical thinking skills in the context of biology and physics.

Instructional labs are fundamental to an undergraduate physics curriculum, but their possible learning goals are vast with limited evidence to support any particular goal. In this study, we evaluate the efficacy of labs with different goals and structures on students' critical thinking skills and views about experimentation, using an extensive database of survey responses from over 20 000 students at over 100 institutions.

As physics laboratory courses (labs) transition from traditional, model-verifying activities to discovery-based investigations, it becomes crucial to understand the role of the instructor in the implementation of various lab types. Prior work has started to address this need by examining either coarse-grained frequencies or fine-grained content of instructor interactions in labs. However, neither of these methods offer both a detailed and time-efficient procedure for measuring such interactions, which is required for comparisons across multiple sessions of several types of labs.

Physics education research is replete with observations and proposed explanations for gender disparities in physics. In this work, we operationalize a definition for equity as everyone has access to the learning environment and everyone’s voice is heard (adapted from previous definitions). We review prior research that observed inequities in physics lab group work and evaluate the degree to which these inequities may arise from student preferences.

Understanding social interactions among students comprises a rich area of physics education research. Here we focus on the social interactions in introductory physics laboratories (labs). Most existing research in such contexts focuses on within-group social dynamics, however, we argue that interactions between different lab groups are just as valuable, especially in nontraditional (reformed) labs where students have more control over the experimental designs.

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.

With the adoption of instructional laboratories that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular, understanding when students do not engage productively with unexpected data may provide insights into how to better support students in more open-ended labs. We examine video and audio data from groups within a lab session where students were expected to find data inconsistent with the predictions of two models.