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Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills

Guide To Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills

Version 2022.1

Description
Benefits
Effective Practices
Assessments
Resources
Evidence

Physics is an empirical science. Experimental skills provide the basis for experiments that enable physicists to explore the natural world and to construct, test, refine, and apply theoretical models. Experimental skills encompass experimental design and development, building and testing of models, troubleshooting, evaluation of uncertainties and results, literature review, use and limitations of equipment, analysis and interpretation of data, evidence-based argumentation, communication, lab safety, handling ethical issues, teamwork, and perseverance. Experimental skills may be incorporated into any part of the curriculum but are usually developed in instructional laboratories, which may be independent courses or attached to other courses. This section provides guidance on designing instructional laboratories that focus on developing experimental skills rather than teaching content that could be taught in other courses. This section includes curricular guidance that spans experiences from introductory and non-STEM major courses through advanced and independent laboratory environments. For guidance on developing experimental skills through independent or course-based research experiences, see the section on Undergraduate Research. For guidance on developing computational skills, see the section on Computational Skills.

Benefits

Well-designed instructional laboratories provide a particular opportunity to teach the experimental skills that are central to the process of doing physics, to engage students in the process of science, and to support students in learning where models in physics come from and how to construct new models. These skills provide students with the opportunity to explore the nature of science, experimentation, and measurement. Instructional laboratories also provide an excellent opportunity to support students in developing identities as scientists and having positive experiences with physics. Laboratory experiences can support students’ understanding of, and excitement about, the discipline. Developing experimental skills enables students to pursue a variety of career options in public- and private-sector employment and graduate education.

The Cycle of Reflection and Action

Where are you and what are you trying to accomplish?

Who should be involved?

What will you do?

How did it go and what comes next?

To be intentional about change, a department must have a clear understanding of its present situation and a vision for what it would like to become. Our cycle of self-reflection questions will help your department start conversations and structure thinking about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

The Cycle of Reflection and Action will help you put the EP3 Guide to work for your department.

Learn more about the Cycle of Reflection and Action and how it can help your department.

Effective Practices

Design and assess a coherent sequence of instructional laboratories using course- and program-level student learning outcomes
1. Convene appropriate stakeholders to develop recommendations for
  for experimental skills. Consider including in your stakeholder group employers, alumni, and leaders from other departments, as well as departmental faculty and other
  , especially those who mentor students in undergraduate research.
  Determine what skills students should have when they enter a research group, when they start upper-level lab courses, and when they complete your program.
  Use the learning outcomes in the AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum and the learning goals on pages 19–21 of the Phys21 report to help generate student learning outcomes. Include Phys21 student learning outcomes for professional skills, e.g., C.3, C.5, D.1, D.2, D.5.f, and D.8.
  Communicate student learning outcomes to all
  and discuss how instruction can support these outcomes.
2. Facilitate regular department-wide discussions about the number and variety of, and number of course credits offered for, lab courses across the curriculum for physics majors, other STEM majors, and non-STEM majors. Include faculty, students, and staff in these discussions. Consider the skills you want your students to develop and the costs, personnel, and space needed for each instructional laboratory.
  Consider collecting baseline data on student learning in instructional laboratories to inform your discussions and decisions about course design. See Programmatic Assessments below for details.
  Develop a
  that incorporates the scope and sequence of experimental skills developed throughout the curriculum. Ensure that the curriculum reinforces and enhances key experimental skills (e.g., model building, experimental design, error analysis, data collection, and troubleshooting) in multiple ways, and provides opportunities for students to learn foundational skills (e.g., operation of scientific instrumentation and experimental documentation) before using them in more advanced courses. Provide opportunities for students to develop skills in a range of contexts, e.g., to develop communication skills through writing a lab report, taking notes in a lab notebook, preparing a poster, and/or giving a talk. Ensure that assessment activities and
  align with the curriculum map.
  Ensure that the number of credits associated with each instructional laboratory is appropriate for the time and effort expected of students. Recognize that assigning too few credits may communicate to students that lecture courses are more important than laboratories and/or burden students by requiring them to take a heavy course load to meet credit requirements.
  Determine an appropriate balance of lab, lecture, and/or integrated courses, and how these courses will be related to each other. Consider the benefits and costs of course designs that have labs as stand-alone courses, designs that have labs associated with lecture courses, and designs that integrate laboratory and classroom instruction, such as
  and
  .
  Determine which student learning outcomes will be addressed in which course components. Use laboratory investigations primarily to teach experimental skills and construct knowledge experimentally rather than to reinforce content learned elsewhere; evidence suggests that instructional laboratories are not effective for reinforcing content. Consider reinforcing content through interactive demonstrations in lecture classes; evidence supports this approach for learning content.
  When an instructional laboratory is associated with a lecture course, determine how the pace and content of laboratory activities aligns with the overall course. For example, consider designing labs that build and explore models using content knowledge introduced elsewhere, or that use experimental investigations to construct new models before those models are taught in other parts of the course. Recognize that students may not be able to engage in labs as deeply if they don’t have the necessary content knowledge. Plan for the fact that depending on which day of the week a lab section is scheduled, it may meet before or after corresponding lectures.
  See the section on How to Create and Sustain Effective Change for guidance on how to structure and sustain curricular change.
3. Convene appropriate stakeholders (e.g., current and former course
  , former students, and faculty from departments that require courses in your department) to create and/or review
  . Circulate student learning outcomes to collect feedback and get buy-in. Review, update, and approve student learning outcomes, and disseminate them to all instructional staff.
  Develop student learning outcomes for instructional laboratories that take advantage of the unique opportunities available in lab, that are distinct from outcomes developed in other parts of the curriculum, and that address how experimental results inform scientific understanding. Learning outcomes could include the ability to, e.g., design experiments to construct or test models, use data as the basis for answering scientific questions, repeat experiments to validate results, and argue from evidence. See AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum for further examples. Recognize that labs are not an ideal environment for teaching and reinforcing content knowledge.
  Ensure that
  are appropriate for the needs and interests of the students each course serves, e.g., physics majors, other STEM majors, or non-STEM majors.
  For courses in the physics major, ensure that
  align with your
  . See 1.B.iii above.
  For courses with large populations of students majoring in STEM fields other than physics, ensure that
  align with the skills, practices, and knowledge that students are expected to have in future laboratory courses in their own disciplines.
  For courses with large populations of non-STEM majors, ensure that
  align with students’ interests and goals, and with applicable general education requirements from your institution. See the section on Courses for non-STEM Majors for details.
  Ensure that all student learning outcomes can be readily understood by
  and students. Explicitly discuss the learning outcomes for each lab with students, to help them develop awareness of their own learning.
  Design student learning outcomes that are limited, achievable, and measurable. Consider what can reasonably be accomplished within the time students are expected to spend on a course.
4. See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for detailed guidance on how to use a cyclic process to design, assess, and improve courses based on student learning outcomes.
  See the section on How to Assess Student Learning at the Program Level for details on how to use learning assessment to improve your curriculum.
  Convene appropriate stakeholders (e.g., current and former course
  , former students, faculty from departments that require courses in your department, and experts in instructional design) to create laboratory experiences that enable students to achieve
  .
  Hold an annual meeting with all
  involved in your undergraduate instructional laboratories to discuss how well the program is working. Promote the idea that instructional laboratories and the curriculum as a whole belong to the department, so instructional staff need to agree on the material that students should learn in instructional laboratories. Consider creating guides that outline the learning outcomes associated with each lab experience and charging a group of relevant stakeholders (e.g., current and former instructional staff for the associated courses) with revising these guides on a scheduled basis.
  Maintain a running record for i
  and
  to report issues with specific labs and suggestions for improvement. Have a meeting at the end of each term for all instructional staff and instructional support staff to review feedback, discuss how labs went, and discuss what might be improved.
  Provide opportunities for faculty, students, or staff who attend conferences or workshops about lab education to share with the department what they learned and what practices they want to try in future instructional labs.
  Regularly review and update instructional laboratories,
  , and
  . Incorporate the results of assessments, feedback, and discussions, along with current pedagogy, methods, and equipment.
Design and provide experiences that are central to the process of doing experimental physics
1. Engage students in all aspects of the experimental process including locating and understanding previously published work on a topic, defining a problem or asking a question, designing and building an experiment, choosing appropriate equipment, taking data, validating data, processing and analyzing data, drawing evidence-based conclusions, developing models from data, comparing data or results to predictions of theory or models, modifying approaches and/or iterating experiments, documenting and communicating results, and considering next steps.
  Rather than ask students to engage in the full experimental process for each lab experience, consider focusing some labs or groups of labs on particular skills or aspects of the experimental process. For example, some introductory labs could focus on statistical analysis of data, while others could focus on refining writing and presentation skills. Consider not asking students to write a full lab report for every lab.
  Include experiments that measure values that are only knowable empirically (e.g., the period of a particular pendulum, the coefficient of static friction between a student’s shoe and a floor tile, or the heat capacity of a random object), or whose outcomes are otherwise not known.
  Use labs to refine and test the limits of models introduced elsewhere, rather than to confirm their correctness. Recognize that students find “confirmatory” labs inauthentic and may behave accordingly, e.g., by engaging in data manipulation and questionable research practices to obtain a predetermined outcome.
  Provide opportunities for students to engage in and explicitly discuss multiple ways for experiments to interact with theoretical models as part of the process of creating scientific knowledge. For example, include testing experiments that test theoretical models and their limits and discovery experiments, such as ISLE-based labs, that use observations to develop a model.
  Provide activities that help students understand how accuracy, precision, and uncertainty limit various forms of measurement; and how to choose among different methods for carrying out an investigation. For example, ask students to compare the accuracy and precision of various methods.
  Provide laboratory experiences that enable students to design an experiment. For example, pose a question or problem for which multiple accessible methods of investigation exist, and give students access to a variety of equipment, such as tools for video-capture, stop-watch-timing, or position-detector measurements. See, e.g., Scientific Community Laboratories or ISLE-based labs.
  Provide opportunities, time, and motivation for students to engage in iteration (by, e.g., giving students time to design and/or implement improvements to an approach or analysis) and reflection (by, e.g., asking students to write about how an experiment progressed or resulted in findings that differed from expectations).
  Provide opportunities for students to learn to use lab notebooks to support their scientific thinking by, e.g., reading and discussing scientists’ lab notebooks in order to develop models and rubrics for the function of lab notebooks, and using these rubrics to evaluate their own lab notebooks. See Resources below for details.
  See the section on Ethics for guidance on how to include opportunities to learn about the ethics of experimental practices and support a culture of ethical research in your department.
2. Incorporate activities with different levels of guidance, from structured activities to open-ended experiments.
  Provide students with opportunities to work on student-led projects.
  Scaffold student learning by gradually reducing assistance as experiments progress. For example, for early investigations, provide guidance on specifics such as how many data points to collect; for later investigations, reduce or change the guidance to build self-reliance and encourage students to think more deeply about how to make experimental decisions.
  Use prompting questions (e.g., What question do you plan to investigate? What equipment will you use? How will you use the equipment to gather data? How do you know your data will answer your original question?) rather than step-by-step instructions, to promote understanding of how experimental science is done.
  Design labs so that students are actively engaged in the investigation and experience a sense of accomplishment and/or joy. For example, have students choose a topic, an experimental design, and/or experimental procedures.
  Encourage students to reflect on how labs are supporting them in developing specific skills and achieving learning outcomes.
3. Provide opportunities for students to apply physical principles directly to real problems and/or social issues by, e.g., measuring noise near an airport, pollutants in drinking water or soil, radiation from a kitchen’s marble slab, or the efficiency of solar panels.
  Connect the techniques and skills developed in instructional laboratories with applications to common technologies and/or problems. For example, use a lab on electric motors to troubleshoot and repair broken appliances; use a lab involving high-sensitivity measurements to explore how such techniques can be applied to airborne virus detection; or use a lab involving the measurement of the efficiency of different kinds of engines to explore the implications of energy efficiency for climate change.
  Construct laboratory exercises that allow students to explore the limitations of approximations, e.g., the effect of drag on projectiles or the non-zero resistance of wires in circuits.
4. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance on how to align assessment practices with course goals.
  Align grading rubrics and criteria with
  . See Resources below for examples of rubrics.
  Consider the benefits and costs of different kinds of evaluations of students’ lab work, e.g., review of lab notebooks and lab reports, check-out interviews, lab exams, or
  .
  Communicate to students how their learning will be evaluated, and reinforce this throughout the term.
  Provide opportunities and credit for students’ attempts to iteratively improve or extend their investigations.
Design and provide laboratory experiences that support the process of doing experimental physics
1. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance and resources on how to facilitate students working together effectively in small groups.
  Promote and develop projects in which students work in groups to achieve a shared experimental goal.
  Provide students with instruction and resources on how to navigate group dynamics. Support students in developing skills related to, e.g., communication, time management, ethical treatment of others, conflict resolution, roles or work assignments, and managing responsibilities.
  Encourage students to reflect on which elements of an experiment need to be understood by all group members (e.g., theory, experimental design, precision of measurement), and which elements can be distributed among members (e.g., hardware fabrication, electronics, modeling, data acquisition, communication of results).
  Consider the benefits and possible drawbacks of requiring inter-group communication and decision making. Benefits include practice in communicating ideas, generation of a wider range of ideas, better vetting of methods, and sharing of lessons learned. Possible drawbacks include increased time needed, less independence, and potential for reducing the diversity of approaches.
2. See the section on Communication Skills for guidance on supporting students in developing writing, speaking, and other formal and informal communication skills through feedback from peers and
  .
  Engage students in various forms of written and oral communication, e.g., lab reports, lab notebooks, whiteboard sketches, presentations, posters, project proposals, and journal-style papers.
  Incorporate technical writing skills (e.g., crafting language that enables someone to replicate an experiment, and using graphs and tables to present data and to clarify and simplify arguments) throughout each instructional laboratory.
  Provide feedback on students’ written and oral work and opportunities for students to revise their work after receiving feedback. Provide prompt feedback (using, e.g., rubrics and/or collaboration software such as Google Docs that enables faster feedback than collection of and comments on hard copies) so that students can revise or improve subsequent work.
  Have students review each other's written and oral work to mimic the peer review process and to provide
  .
  Consider written and oral assignments in which students frame their results for non-technical audiences through, e.g., blogs, newspaper articles, and podcasts.
  Provide time, space, and an audience for student presentations about lab projects. For example, consider requiring students to create posters or oral presentations; and encourage faculty, staff, and students to attend presentations.
  Focus each laboratory writing assignment on specific
  . For example, focus some assignments on specific communication skills such as brainstorming initial ideas or writing a formal report, others on writing discussions of error analysis, and others on skills other than communication skills.
  Consult your campus writing center or teaching and learning center to identify and implement activities that scaffold students’ written and oral communication skills.
3. Develop and implement lab activities that facilitate and increase students’ familiarity with modern equipment, e.g., digital lock-in amplifiers, avalanche photodiodes, and tunable lasers.
  Have students do experiments involving complex systems in which parameters can be determined only through measurement rather than theoretical models (e.g., the thermal conductivity of a complex material or structure, or the background in radiation measurements).
  Teach students to identify, locate, obtain, and use equipment, materials, or intellectual resources that are not readily available but that are accessible within time and budgetary constraints. For example, encourage students to ask peers or
  , search the internet, and borrow or purchase equipment or other materials. Help students learn to prioritize easier avenues over more difficult and/or expensive ones for accessing resources needed to do an experiment.
  Provide students with opportunities to explore a variety of data collection and interfacing tools, e.g., Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, Pyboards, MATLAB, LabView, and/or various instrumentation-specific software.
  Provide students with opportunities to explore a variety of data analysis and modeling tools, e.g., Mathematica, MATLAB, COMSOL, Python, or Excel.
  See the section on Computational Skills for guidance on building familiarity with computation and computational software throughout your curriculum, including in advanced laboratories.
  Incorporate experimental design into lab projects and activities. Provide students with opportunities to design and fabricate experimental systems, using, e.g., experimental design software such as CAD, SPICE, Zemax, or OSLO; machine tools; circuit fabrication; and 3D printing.
Use research-based teaching practices and inclusive pedagogy in your instructional laboratories
1. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance on how to:
  Understand and apply the key recommendations from physics education research,
  Support students in understanding, buying into, and engaging in research-based teaching,
  Facilitate students working together effectively in small groups, and
  Use particular methods, strategies, curricula, and tools developed through research.
  Consider using research-based materials designed for instructional labs, e.g., Thinking Critically in Physics Labs, ISLE-based labs, or Scientific Community Laboratories. See Resources below.
  Use research-based physics assessment practices as appropriate. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance on how to use research-based assessment practices. See Programmatic Assessments below for examples.
2. Recognize that standard laboratory course designs may not meet the needs of many constituencies of students, e.g., first-generation college students, commuter students, students working full-time, students raising children, and/or students from other
  . Discuss participation structures with students to ensure that everyone can participate fully. For example, parents may need to care for children at certain times of day; students may not be comfortable spending time alone with lab partners during evening hours; and students who work may not be able to spend long hours in the lab outside of scheduled class times.
  Help lab
  realize their goals around inclusivity and student-centered instruction by connecting them with relevant campus resources and support. For example, suggest that instructional staff request feedback on course materials or classroom practices from your institution’s teaching and learning center or an expert colleague (in a context in which that colleague’s help is departmentally recognized as service or mentoring). Provide incentives to lab instructional staff and
  to participate in training focused on fostering inclusiveness in learning environments in which students work in groups and on preventing harassment.
  Ensure that all students, particularly those who have had the least access to previous lab experiences, are provided with resources to support learning and taught how to learn from those resources. See the section on Introductory Courses for STEM Majors for guidance on how to support students to maximize their learning.
  Ensure that laboratory spaces and practices are accessible to all by proactively identifying and implementing
  tailored to apparatus, software, and activities used in physics lab courses and to the physical layout of lab spaces. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to support disabled people.
  See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance on how to understand and implement inclusive teaching practices that support the diversity of students in your classes.
  See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to ensure that your classes are equitable and inclusive.
  See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to ensure that your classes and curriculum create an inclusive and student-centered environment for all.
Support laboratory instructional staff and instructional support staff
1. Provide lab
  with professional development that supports them in facilitating student learning by, e.g., challenging students to think and act critically and creatively in carrying out experiments, recognizing student frustration and providing appropriate interventions, and designing experimental activities that promote student agency and ownership.
  Provide and promote opportunities and resources for
  to attend relevant workshops and conferences on laboratory development (e.g., the ALPhA Laboratory Immersions program and/or Conference on Laboratory Instruction Beyond the First Year, and national or regional
  meetings) and to present about or publish their teaching approaches (in, e.g., the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher).
  Provide regular opportunities for
  and
  to discuss student progress in laboratories, especially when implementing a newly designed or redesigned lab experience, or when bringing on new instructional support staff. Encourage instructional support staff to provide feedback on difficulties that students encounter in laboratories to allow instructional staff to continually improve the laboratory learning experience.
  Provide regular opportunities for
  teaching in the undergraduate lab curriculum to meet to discuss successes and difficulties, in order to build community among laboratory instructional staff, continually improve lab experiences, and support vertical integration and comprehensive coverage of
  .
  If a laboratory is related to a lecture with different
  , provide regular opportunities for instructional staff in the two components to work together to integrate these components.
  For guidance on supporting
  and
  in using research-based and inclusive practices, see 4 above.
2. Require
  to work through all aspects of laboratories for which they will provide instruction.
  Ask
  to consider the possible paths students may pursue through each laboratory experience.
  Encourage
  to identify ways to support students in their decision making, balancing sufficient guidance to keep students productive with opportunities for agency and ownership of experiments.
  Discuss with
  
  and learning outcomes associated with each lab experience to ensure a cohesive approach to laboratory instruction.
  Use campus resources (e.g., your teaching and learning center) to supplement
  training.
  If undergraduates assist in your instructional labs (e.g., as part of a
  ), see the section on Undergraduate Instructional Assistants for guidance on training and supporting these
  .
3. Consider contact hours and responsibilities for laboratory preparation, evaluation, and improvement when assigning
  and
  to laboratory sections or courses. Ensure that teaching credits for instructional laboratories are appropriate to the time and effort expected, working with your administration and other STEM departments if appropriate.
  Recognize and reward
  contributions to the development and improvement of laboratory experiences by, for example, providing release time and/or taking these contributions into account in tenure, promotion, merit, and annual reviews.
Create and maintain laboratory spaces and equipment and a safe environment
1. Provide students with training appropriate to each lab course on safety practices (e.g., laser safety, radiation safety, hazardous material handling, and high voltages safety), the location and correct use of safety equipment, and what to do when there is an accident or emergency.
  Provide more extensive training on ensuring a safe instructional lab environment for
  ,
  , and students who will be doing unsupervised work, e.g., those who will be working after hours or in separate enclosed spaces.
  Ensure that there are well-known policies and practices for all levels of accidents or emergencies, and that students and staff know, e.g., where to find the first aid kit and how to deal with a fire or chemical spill.
  Conduct an annual safety audit of all spaces with all
  and your safety officer. Consider also inviting a local industrial safety officer to assist and provide an outside perspective.
  Ensure that safety equipment (e.g., eye and hand protection, fire extinguisher) and containers for disposing hazardous materials are well marked and accessible.
  Ensure that access and egress routes in all spaces are free of obstacles and trip hazards so that people can safely exit spaces during emergencies.
  Create and enforce policies that specify appropriate clothing, when protective equipment must be worn, and when food and drink consumption is or is not allowed in lab spaces.
  Include questions on lab exams or
  that probe students’ knowledge of safety concerns and practices.
2. Work with institutional leaders (e.g. the dean, the provost, and/or chairs of other STEM departments) to secure appropriate funds to equip, maintain, and modernize instructional laboratories. Recognize that external sources of such funds are becoming increasingly rare and that administrators may prefer to eliminate labs that appear too costly; plan your strategy accordingly. See the section on How to Be an Effective Chair for guidance on how to manage and advocate for resources.
  Designate a place to calibrate, maintain, repair, and store equipment. Provide financial support for test equipment and supplies needed to use and maintain that equipment.
  Identify who is responsible for maintaining equipment and materials for instructional laboratories (e.g., a lab manager or a group of
  ) and provide necessary training and resources. Ensure clear lines of communication to departmental leadership. Consider providing these responsible personnel a budget to purchase replacement equipment as needed.
  Ensure that timely support is available to repair or replace equipment that is broken during one lab session and needed in subsequent lab sessions.
  Keep a record of equipment and other materials needed for instructional laboratories to enable your department to plan proactively for replacements, upgrades, and improvements. Keep and regularly review calibration and maintenance records for all equipment.
  Organize and make available manuals for all equipment, providing access to all users and to personnel responsible for maintenance and calibration.
  Store hazardous materials (e.g., acids, solvents, and radioactive substances) in cabinets approved for their storage. Limit access to hazardous or valuable materials.
3. Involve all stakeholders, including faculty, students, facilities management, and architects, from the beginning of the design process.
  Design spaces that support teaching and learning practices your department wants to use in labs, e.g., interactive engagement, small-group experiments, student collaboration with whiteboards, computational activities, and/or student presentations. If appropriate, consider using
  or
  as a model for instructional space design.
  Design spaces that can be adapted for a variety of uses by incorporating, e.g., movable desks or tables, flexible utilities, computer projection, and fume hoods.
  Ensure that each space is appropriately sized to accommodate anticipated needs. Consider, for example, how many students,
  members, and
  members will use each space; how often the space is used; how the space is used (e.g., for multiple-week experiments); the amount of storage space needed for all courses and labs using each space and for storing any hazardous materials; and the space, door widths, and turning radii needed for equipment.
  Design lab spaces that are accessible. Ensure that there are entrances to lab spaces that do not require stairs, that all passages are wide enough to allow for wheelchair access, and that there are lab tables at an appropriate height for students who use wheelchairs. Ensure that lab spaces meet and go beyond compliance with the
  and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which mandates equitable access for
  in institutions that receive federal funding. Learn about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and use
  to proactively ensure that your lab spaces support all learners by reflecting the variability of their needs, abilities, and interests. See the
  Committee on Laboratories Accessible Physics Labs Task Force Report for details. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to support disabled people.
  Consider how lab spaces can communicate departmental culture, draw students into your departmental community, and convey the excitement of experimental physics by, e.g., designing windows into lab spaces and making sure they are uncovered, and creating inclusive and welcoming visual displays.
  See the section on The Physical Environment: Encouraging Collaboration and Learning for guidance on how to design new spaces or renovate existing ones.

Programmatic Assessments

Identify which of the above Effective Practices you are implementing and track the results of implementing them.
Inventory where your curriculum and extra-curricular experiences (e.g., undergraduate research) introduce, emphasize, and reinforce
for experimental skills. Track which instructional laboratories are designed to achieve or reinforce particular student learning outcomes, and determine whether your program’s sequence of instructional laboratories scaffolds learning from one course to the next.
Determine which students and majors each of your instructional laboratories serves. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to conduct inventories. Review or create course-level student learning outcomes that align with your departmental mission and the needs of these students. Periodically evaluate whether these outcomes remain aligned with your departmental mission and students’ needs. See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for guidance on developing and assessing course-level student learning outcomes. Analyze your current lab curriculum to determine how well it aligns with your program-level and course-level student learning outcomes and with students’ needs.
Inventory the spaces and equipment available for your instructional laboratories to determine whether they are adequate for achieving your student learning outcomes for experimental skills.
Use surveys, focus groups, or exit interviews with current students and alumni to assess students’ perceptions of the relevance, coherence, and effectiveness of your instructional laboratories; how well instructional laboratories met particular
and prepared them for their future careers; difficulties students had in these courses; and support students received from
and peers. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to use student feedback forms for formative assessment and how to use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to learn about your students.
Collect feedback and perspectives from
and
about instructional laboratories.
Review the expertise of your faculty and other
with respect to experimental skills, and identify gaps that could be addressed through on- or off-campus professional development.
Use multiple measures to assess your
for instructional laboratories, including pre- and post-tests, designated elements of laboratory notebooks and reports chosen for their relevance to particular outcomes, presentations, and projects. When appropriate, use rubrics tailored to each outcome. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to assess student learning.
Assess students’ learning of experimental skills by giving research-based assessments of these skills at the beginning and end of the term. See the PhysPort Assessments database for an extensive collection of such assessments, including the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking (PLIC), the Concise Data Processing Assessment (CDPA), and the scientific abilities rubrics.
Assess shifts in student attitudes and beliefs about experimental physics by giving a research-based survey such as the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) at the beginning and end of the term.
Use multiple measures to evaluate teaching quality, including peer observations, research-based observation protocols such as the Laboratory Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (LOPUS),
self-evaluation or reflection on their teaching, measures of student learning and beliefs (see above), and student evaluations. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to assess teaching effectiveness, using multiple methods and recognizing the limitations of each method.
Compare the success of students in different instructional laboratories or lab sections by tracking enrollment,
, and measures of student learning. Account for differences that may be caused by scheduling, differences in grading, or normalized grading schemes. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to track department metrics.
Ask alumni, their employers, and the directors of their graduate programs, as well as faculty who supervise your students in undergraduate research, how effective they perceive your program’s instructional laboratories to be and how well prepared your students are with respect to experimental skills.
Disaggregate all data by demographics and major to determine whether instructional laboratories are serving all groups. Look for patterns of inequity in enrollment and success in these courses and in follow-on courses, as well as patterns of inequity in persistence in STEM majors. Determine whether any of these courses differentially recruit certain kinds of students to or exclude certain kinds of students from the physics major. For guidance on how to collect and analyze demographic data respectfully and protect anonymity, see the Guidelines for Demographic Questions in the supplement on How to Design Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups.
Keep track of major revisions to the student learning outcomes, curriculum, and activities of each instructional laboratory, and determine how these revisions impact measures of student success.

Resources

Research-based curricular materials for laboratories

Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE): A research-based curriculum that helps students learn physics by engaging them in processes that mirror scientific practice. Includes ISLE-based labs.
Scientific Community Laboratories: Design labs for introductory physics courses in which students work in groups to design an experiment, carry it out, analyze it, and present their results to other groups.
Thinking Critically in Physics Labs: Research-based labs that aim to teach students about the nature of scientific experimentation and to develop their experimentation and critical thinking skills.
University of Colorado lab resources for instructors: Research-based course materials, frameworks, and assessments for engaging students in authentic scientific practices such as modeling, writing, and drawing conclusions and making decisions based on measurements that have uncertainty. For use in all levels of undergraduate lab courses.
See the Resources in the sections on Courses for Non-STEM Majors and Introductory Courses for Life Sciences Majors for curricular materials for laboratories targeted to these audiences.
PhysPort: Resources based on physics education research that support teaching. Includes overviews of research-based teaching methods and materials, open-source curricula, expert recommendations, and assessments for instructional laboratories in physics. PhysPort features an expert recommendation on how to develop
Course-Level Student Learning Outcomes
Statements describing what students should be able to do as a result of completing a particular course. Outcomes emphasize the integration and application of knowledge rather than coverage of material, and are observable, measurable, and demonstrable. They use specific, active verbs (e.g., “solve,” “describe,” and “calculate”) rather than “understand.” Course-level student learning outcomes are often abbreviated as course-level SLOs and are also known as course-level learning goals. Examples include:
Solve the Schroedinger equation in one dimension for commonly encountered simple potentials
Describe physical situations that correspond to simple potential energy curves
Calculate the electric field or potential due to a system of charges using Coulomb’s law
Course-level student learning outcomes are generally specific to the knowledge and skills addressed in individual courses, in contrast to program-level student learning outcomes, which focus on overall program outcomes. For instructional staff, these learning outcomes clarify what the course will deliver and unite course content with course-level assessments. Specifying course-level learning outcomes in individual course syllabi is often a requirement for accreditation of your institution, or of the institution itself. Assessment of course-level student learning outcomes through course assignments or examinations should be aligned with assessment of program-level learning outcomes, when possible. See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for guidance on how to use a cyclic process to design, assess, and improve courses based on student learning outcomes. For examples, see the PhysPort expert recommendation How do I develop student learning outcomes for physics courses?
with examples from introductory and advanced physics laboratories.

Rubrics for assessing scientific practices and laboratory notebooks

Scientific Abilities Assessment Rubrics
L. J. Atkins and I. Y. Salter, “Using scientists’ notebooks to foster authentic scientific practices,” Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2012 (2012).
J. T. Stanley and H. J. Lewandowski, “Recommendations for the use of notebooks in upper-division physics lab courses,” American Journal of Physics 86(1), 45–53 (2018).

Other resources

The Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA): A group that promotes communication and sharing of resources among advanced laboratory physics instructors worldwide and provides a Lab Immersions Program, the Conference on Laboratory Instruction Beyond the First Year, and regular gatherings at national and regional
meetings.
W. F. Smith (editor), Experimental Physics: Principles and Practice for the Laboratory, Taylor & Francis (2020).
J. Kozminski et al., “AAPT recommendations for the undergraduate physics laboratory curriculum,” American Association of Physics Teachers (2014): A report from an
committee charged with developing guidance for laboratory curricula.
D. R. Dounas-Frazer, D. Gillen, C. M. Herne, E. Howard, R. S. Lindell, G I. McGrew, J. R. Mumford, N. H. Nguyen, L. C. Osadchuk, J. Principato Crane, T. M. Pugeda, K. Reeves, E. M. Scanlon, D. Spiecker, and S. Z. Xu, “Increase Investment in Accessible Physics Labs: A Call to Action for the Physics Education Community,” American Association of Physics Teachers, Committee on Laboratories Accessible Physics Labs Task Force Report (2021).
P. Heron, L. McNeil, et al. (editors), “Phys21: Preparing Physics Students for 21st-Century Careers,” American Physical Society (2016).

Evidence

E. Etkina, A. Karelina, M. Ruibal-Villasenor, R. Jordan, D. Rosengrant, and C. Hmelo-Silver, “Design and reflection help students develop scientific abilities: Learning in introductory physics laboratories,” Journal of the Learning Sciences 19(1) 54–98 (2010).
D. R. Dounas-Frazer and H. J. Lewandowski, “The Modelling Framework for Experimental Physics: description, development, and applications,” European Journal of Physics 39(6) (2018).
N. G. Holmes and C. E. Wieman, “Introductory physics labs: We can do better,” Physics Today 71(1), 38–45 (2018).

Benefits

Effective Practices

Design and assess a coherent sequence of instructional laboratories using course- and program-level student learning outcomes

Design and provide experiences that are central to the process of doing experimental physics

Design and provide laboratory experiences that support the process of doing experimental physics

Use research-based teaching practices and inclusive pedagogy in your instructional laboratories

Support laboratory instructional staff and instructional support staff

Create and maintain laboratory spaces and equipment and a safe environment

Programmatic Assessments