Assessing learning across a biology major can help departments monitor achievement of broader program-level goals and identify opportunities for curricular improvement. However, biology departments have lacked suitable tools to measure learning at the program scale. To address this need, we developed four freely available assessments called Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science or Bio-MAPS for general biology, molecular biology, ecology/evolution, and physiology programs.

Despite the significant amount of time undergraduate students spend in introductory physics labs, there is little consensus on instructional goals and accepted diagnostic assessments for these labs. In response to these issues, we have developed the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC) to assess students' proficiency with critical thinking in a physics lab context. Specifically, the PLIC aims to evaluate students' skills in making sense of data, variability, models, and experimental methods and to assess the effectiveness of lab courses at developing these skills.

Many institutions are changing the focus of their introductory physics labs from verifying physics content towards teaching students about the skills and nature of science. As instruction shifts, so too will the ways students approach and behave in the labs. In this study, we evaluated students' lab notes from an early activity in an experimentation-focused lab course.

As educational technologies become increasingly important in K-12 physics education, it is important to understand why and how teachers choose to adopt certain technologies. We examined 2000 responses from a survey of high school teachers on how they used PhET interactive simulations (mostly in physics) and what value they felt it provided their students. The analysis helps inform what aspects of an educational technology support or hinder its adoption. First, the teachers valued flexibility.

Students' expectations about a class (their 'frames') affect how they interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. However, little is known about students' framing of lab activities. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical thinking with data, students test a simple model of a pendulum that breaks down with improved measurements. Using in-lab video and follow-up interviews, we identified students' frequent use of a model-verifying frame that substantially interferes with the instructional goals.

A ball on a stick is a common and simple activity for teaching the phases of the Moon. This activity, like many others in physics and astronomy, gives students a perspective they otherwise could only imagine. For Moon phases, a third person view and control over time allows students to rapidly build a mental model that connects all the moving parts. Computer simulations of many traditional physics and astronomy activities provide new features, controls, or vantage points to enhance learning beyond a hands-on activity.

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) has been utilized to measure learning gains in electricity and magnetism (E and M) physics courses, where “correct“ vs “incorrect“ responses are typically used for analysis. However, such comparisons do not necessarily identify specific changes in student reasoning from pre- to post-instruction. To address this issue, we have generated network-like graphs for each question: Responses at pre- and post-test are represented by nodes connected by edges representing the change in student response choice.

While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students' physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we performed in-lab observations of student actions over two semesters in two pedagogically different sections of the same introductory physics course. We used a cluster analysis to identify different categories of student behaviour and analyzed how they correlate with lab structure and gender.

Instructional labs are widely seen as a unique, albeit expensive, way to teach scientific content. We measured the effectiveness of introductory lab courses at achieving this educational goal across nine different lab courses at three very different institutions. These institutions and courses encompassed a broad range of student populations and instructional styles. The nine courses studied had two key things in common: the labs aimed to reinforce the content presented in lectures, and the labs were optional.