Abstract
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. This exploratory study aimed to answer three research questions: (RQ1) What are students’ expectations about the purpose of labs when they enter introductory physics?, (RQ2) How do their prior experiences shape those expectations?, (RQ3) In what ways do those expectations relate to their engagement in questionable research practices? Through open-response surveys, we found that students overwhelmingly expressed confirmatory beliefs about the purpose of labs. Through interviews, we found that students’ prior lab experiences were also overwhelmingly confirmatory, despite varying degrees of structure. We then used video of individual groups to explore the ways in which questionable research practices manifest through confirmatory expectations. We confirm previous work that students’ confirmatory expectations can lead them to engage in questionable research practices, but find that these behaviors occur despite instructional messaging about an alternative purpose. Our analyses also suggest that engagement in questionable research practices is more frequent than the previous results indicated through analysis of submitted lab notes. These results further illuminate issues with traditional labs, but suggest that the confirmatory goals, perhaps more so than high structure, are problematic.Received 30 August 2019Accepted 4 March 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.010113Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasEpistemology, attitudes, & beliefsProfessional TopicsLower undergraduate studentsPhysics Education Research
Highlights
For the past 100 years, instructional physics laboratories have been criticized as being inauthentic [1,2]
We conclude that students’ tendency to expect that physics labs are activities in model confirmation leads to investigations aiming to confirm a model, causing them to engage in questionable research practices
At the start of the course, students in both the engineering and physics courses, provided a brief written response to the question “What do you believe is the purpose of a physics lab?” at the beginning of their first lab meeting as part of an introduction to using their electronic lab notebook
Summary
For the past 100 years, instructional physics laboratories (hereafter referred to as labs) have been criticized as being inauthentic [1,2]. Recent innovations in labs have focused on removing the structure and providing students with various degrees of freedom over the design and execution of experiments [3,4,5]. While these instructional innovations address concerns over how students are expected to approach investigations, little attention has been paid to the nature of what students investigate in labs. Despite many calls to shift the focus of labs to teach students about the nature of science and to develop students’ scientific abilities [6,7,8,9,10], introductory physics
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