Problematizing is a physics practice involving the articulation of a gap in understanding into a clear question or problem. Inquiry-based labs may be conducive to problematizing behaviors, as students often collect data that do not agree with simplified models or their intuitive predictions. In this study, we analyzed video of students performing a lab in which they find the acceleration of an object in flight to be different from what the presented models predict. We aimed to identify the various activities that groups engaged in upon recognizing this inconsistency.

. Instructional physics labs are critical junctures for many STEM majors to develop an understanding of experimentation in the sciences. Students can acquire useful experimental skills and grow their identities as scientists. However, many traditionally-instructed labs do not necessarily involve authentic physics experimentation features in their curricula. Recent research calls for a reformation in undergraduate labs to incorporate more student agency and choice in the learning processes. In our institution, we have adopted open-ended lab teaching in the introductory physics courses.

Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like, putting emphasis on the results of a single experimental trial, whereas set-like thinking relies on the results of many trials. Recent work, however, has found that students rarely fall into one of these two extremes, which may be a limitation of how student thinking is evaluated.

Measurement uncertainty and experimental error are important concepts taught in undergraduate physics laboratories. Although student ideas about error and uncertainty in introductory classical mechanics lab experiments have been studied extensively, there is relatively limited research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty in quantum mechanics.

With ongoing calls to engage students in science through physics lab instruction, understanding how students frame lab environments informs instructional approaches that promote students’ productive engagement. To deliberately identify students’ frames in a new lab environment, two students who were previously in experimentation physics labs were placed together during the first activity of a content-reinforcement lab. The students initially framed the activity as exploring the phenomena and developing investigations, similar to the previous semester.

Physics education research (PER) has long used concept inventories to investigate student learning over time and to compare performance across various student subpopulations. PER has traditionally used normalized gain to explore these questions but has begun to use established methods from other fields, including Cohen's d, multiple linear regression, and linear mixed effects models. The choice of analysis method for examining student learning gains in PER is a current subject of debate.

In physics labs, students experience a wide range of equitable and inequitable interactions. We developed a methodology to characterize different lab groups in terms of their bid exchanges and inchargeness. An equitable group is one in which every student’s bids are heard and acknowledged. Our analysis of equitable and inequitable groups raises questions about how inchargeness and gender interact to affect the functionality of a lab group. © ISLS.

Instructional labs are being transformed to better reflect authentic scientific practice, often by removing aspects of pedagogical structure to support student agency and decision making. We explored how these changes impact men's and women's participation in group work associated with labs through clustering methods on the quantified behavior of students. We compared the group roles students take on in two different types of instructional settings: (i) highly structured traditional labs, and (ii) less structured inquiry-based labs.

Many instructional physics labs are shifting to teach experimentation skills, rather than to demonstrate or confirm canonical physics phenomena. Our previous work found that many students engage in questionable research practices in attempts to confirm the canonical physics phenomena, even when confirmation is explicitly not the goal of the lab.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has enormous potential for education, but classroom resources are limited. Thus, it is important to identify whether and when VR provides sufficient advantages over other modes of learning to justify its deployment. In a between-subjects experiment, we compared three methods of teaching Moon phases (a hands-on activity, VR, and a desktop simulation) and measured student improvement on existing learning and attitudinal measures.