Measuring the impact of introductory physics labs on learning and critical thinking Documents

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Measuring the impact of introductory physics labs on learning and critical thinking 

written by Carl E. Wieman and N. G. Holmes

Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 2% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a modified version of one of these lab courses whose goals also included modeling, designing experiments, and analyzing and visualizing data. This modified course used the same sets of apparatus as the previous version, but changed the pre-lab and in-lab activities to focus on developing and testing models with data. The study evaluated the impact of these additional goals and activities, comparing performance with students in the same course who did not take the lab.  We found that students taking the lab still performed no better or worse on the final exam than students who did not take the lab. We also observe the critical thinking behaviors that were the new goals of the lab.

Last Modified December 16, 2015

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