Physics education researchers have called for a shift from traditional laboratory (lab) instruction to labs that focus on the development of experimental skills. Although research has demonstrated the efficacy of such reformed labs, much work remains to determine what these labs can and should teach students and how best to achieve these goals.…

Teachers' goals and orientations underlie their instructional decision making and can make the difference between "talking the talk" and "walking the walk" when trying to change lab instruction. Schoenfeld's "Resources, Orientations, and Goals" (ROG) framework was employed to shed light on the challenges involved in a…

In undergraduate research settings, students are likely to encounter anomalous data, that is, data that do not meet their expectations. Most of the research that directly or indirectly captures the role of anomalous data in research settings uses post-hoc reflective interviews or surveys. These data collection approaches focus on recall of past…

Instructional physics labs offer students unique opportunities to develop an understanding of experimentation. By transforming labs to be more open ended and experimentation focused, instructors can better support student agency and choice. In this study, we examine students' overall sense of and perceptions about agency in two…

Having the ability to make informed decisions about health, financial investments, and even the weather are all important to our everyday lives. However, most people receive no formal education on how to read and understand data presented in formats such as data tables and graphs. Research within the field of statistical reasoning demonstrates a…

The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The…

A lab activity for teaching physics students the fundamentals of statistical analysis during the first few weeks of instruction is described. This activity involves students timing a pulse of light generated by an Arduino device of fixed duration with individual timers (e.g. stopwatch, iPhone timer). To select the most precise timing methods and…

Studies show that teachers and students use humour when communicating with each other in a science education context. This study investigates the use of humour during a collaborative inquiry laboratory task on an undergraduate chemistry course and an undergraduate physics course. Seven groups of students working on a collaborative inquiry task…

The instructional lab setting has been found to be dominated by prescribed tasks and pre-prepared lab kits. This was explained by teachers' need to guide students to simultaneously progress through a lab curriculum, which prompts them to standardize the lab experience. Nevertheless, prominent professional associations have persistently called to…