Abstract
We investigate students' sense of ownership of multiweek final projects in an upper-division optics lab course. Using a multiple case study approach, we describe three student projects in detail. Within-case analyses focused on identifying key issues in each project, and constructing chronological descriptions of those events. Cross-case analysis focused on identifying emergent themes with respect to five dimensions of project ownership: student agency, instructor mentorship, peer collaboration, interest and value, and affective responses. Our within- and cross-case analyses yielded three major findings. First, coupling division of labor with collective brainstorming can help balance student agency, instructor mentorship, and peer collaboration. Second, students' interest in the project and perceptions of its value can increase over time; initial student interest in the project topic is not a necessary condition for student ownership of the project. Third, student ownership is characterized by a wide range of emotions that fluctuate as students alternate between extended periods of struggle and moments of success while working on their projects. These findings not only extend the literature on student ownership into a new educational domain---namely, upper-division physics labs---they also have concrete implications for the design of experimental physics projects in courses for which student ownership is a desired learning outcome. We describe the course and projects in sufficient detail that others can adapt our results to their particular contexts.
Highlights
The study and improvement of undergraduate lab courses is an increasingly important area of focus in physics education
Drawing on evidence from our study, as well as from previous literature on student ownership, we make three claims: (i) coupling division of labor with collective brainstorming can help balance student agency, instructor mentorship, and peer collaboration; (ii) initial student interest in the project topic is not always a necessary condition for student ownership of the project; and (iii) student ownership is characterized by a wide range of emotions that fluctuate in time as students alternate between extended periods of struggle and moments of success while working on their project
Our study focuses on the final project portion of two similar physics courses taught at Bethel: Optics Lab and Lasers Lab
Summary
The study and improvement of undergraduate lab courses is an increasingly important area of focus in physics education. The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) recently endorsed a report identifying several learning outcomes for lab courses, including student competence with experimental design [1]. The Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs (JTUPP) recommended that advanced lab courses incorporate multiweek research projects in order to support students’ development of career-relevant technical skills [3]. Three areas of education research are relevant to our study: teaching and learning in optics courses, multiweek projects in lab courses, and student ownership in science courses. Previous research on optics education spans a variety of topics, including the development of multimedia activities [11], online materials [12], and interactive learning strategies meant to be implemented in lecture courses [13] or hybrid lecture-studio courses [14]. Some of these efforts incorporated final projects [24,25]; the project portions of the transformed courses have been neither described nor studied in detail
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