There is a growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student-driven rather than instructor-driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content.
However, there is a limited understanding of how students engage in reasoning in these types of labs. At the University of Utah, a collaboration among faculty from the Department of Physics & Astronomy, School of Biological Sciences, and Department of Educational Psychology has implemented a series of reforms to our Algebra-based introductory physics lab courses that enroll a preponderance of biology majors and pre-health students.
In our reform-based Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) labs, we have implemented 3-dimensional (3D) instruction, and our undergraduates engage in semi-autonomous experimentation with a focus on analyzing and interpreting data. Within this setting, we have used the theoretical framework of sensemaking to examine the moment-by-moment details of students’ reasoning about a series of conceptual and procedural inconsistencies. We focus on what the inconsistencies are about and how students resolve them using a narrative case study analysis approach of a single group whose sensemaking is largely representative of the observed data corpus.
Overall, we find that student sensemaking about conceptual and procedural inconsistencies is generally productive, given students’ resolutions and experimental progress. Capturing detailed sensemaking about inconsistencies highlights the richness of students’ reasoning processes in this understudied learning environment that is becoming more prevalent over time.
Lauren Barth-Cohen (Ph.D. Science and Math Education, University of California, Berkeley) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah. She also holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position in the Department of Physics & Astronomy.
We will serve refreshments, coffee and tea. Welcome!
The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE
The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series on Mondays at 13:00-14:00 every other week (odd week numbers) at CCSE.
The seminar will be maximum one hour, often closer to half an hour. It is an informal arena to present and discuss learning theory, educational research and teaching experiences within computational science. To cater to the highly heterogeneous backgrounds and interests of students, teachers and researchers in our environment, we aim for seminars that introduce listeners to new ideas within a broad spectrum of aspects, and that invites reflection and discussion.
Presentations need not be mature and polished - to the contrary we hope that as many as possible wants to share undigested observations and reflections in short presentations of varied form and topics. We hope to have enough contributions to frequently have the meetings as lightning talk sessions, where three different speakers will each give a 5-10-minute presentation followed by discussion.