Abstract
Introductory physics lab courses serve as the starting point for students to learn and experience experimental physics at the undergraduate level. They often focus on measurement uncertainty, an essential topic for practicing physicists and a foundation for more advanced lab learning. As such, measurement uncertainty has been a focus when studying and improving introductory physics lab courses. There is a need for a research-based assessment explicitly focused on measurement uncertainty that captures the breadth of learning related to the topic, and that has been developed and documented in an evidence-centered way. In this work, we present the first step in the development of such an assessment, with the goal of establishing the breadth and depth of the domain of measurement uncertainty in introductory physics labs. We conducted and analyzed interviews with introductory physics lab instructors across the US, identifying prevalent concepts and practices related to measurement uncertainty, and their level of emphasis in introductory physics labs. We find that instructors discuss a range of measurement uncertainty topics beyond basic statistical ideas like mean and standard deviation, including those connected to modeling, another lab learning goal. We describe how these findings will be used in the subsequent development of the assessment, called the Survey Of Physics Reasoning On Uncertainty Concepts In Experiments (SPRUCE).1 MoreReceived 15 February 2021Accepted 5 April 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.17.010133Published 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 AreasAssessmentResearch methodologyProfessional TopicsFacultyLower undergraduate studentsPhysics Education Research
Highlights
Measurement uncertainty is an important learning outcome for physics lab courses, in particular at the introductory level
We described here the first step in creating SPRUCE, an research-based assessment instruments (RBAIs) for measuring learning related to measurement uncertainty in introductory physics lab courses
We centered our work around three research questions that ask about concepts and practices related to measurement uncertainty, and which of these concepts and practices are emphasized in introductory physics labs
Summary
Measurement uncertainty is an important learning outcome for physics lab courses, in particular at the introductory level. RBAIs related to measurement uncertainty have been developed, notably the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) [21], the Concise Data Processing Assessment (CDPA) [22], and parts of both the Laboratory Data Analysis Instrument (LDAI) [23] and the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC) [24]. These RBAIs centered around measurement uncertainty are relatively narrow in scope and are missing the full breadth of important concepts and practices in the topic. Extending and adapting previous work with primary school students [34], these researchers
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