Traditional, template physics labs are often associated with student dissatisfaction and superficial applications, and are known to leave students with fragmented knowledge. An alternative known as labatorials, a conceptually driven approach to labs, has been proposed. In a number of studies, labatorials have been shown to work well. However, what…

It has been well-establishing in the field of educational research that traditional educational methods such as passive lectures and labs where students follow pre-designed procedures to verify information already told to them are not effective for promoting meaningful and lasting conceptual understanding. Alongside this knowledge have come a…

We designed a hands-on laboratory exercise to demonstrate why injecting an aqueous polymer solution into an oil reservoir (commonly known as "polymer flooding") enhances oil production. Students are split into three groups of two to three. Each group is assigned to a packed Hele-Shaw cell pre-saturated with oil, our laboratory model of…

Labs have long been considered an important component of physics education. However, while there has been progress in transforming physics education in physics lecture classes to improve student learning, less progress has been made in introductory physics labs. At the same time, the physics community has come to recognize that there is a need to…

Physics lab instruction is evolving in response to changing technology, a desire to better prepare students for diverse careers, and renewed focus from physics education researchers. To prepare researchers to evaluate progress in instructional labs in the future, this study set out to understand the current state of instructional physics labs in…

We present a laboratory experiment that allows undergraduate or graduate students to get introduced to colloidal crystal research concepts in an interesting way. Moreover, such experiments and studies can also be useful in the field of crystallography or solid-state physics. The work concerns the growth of colloidal crystal thin films obtained…