Comparing Lab Formats

Before the meeting Nathan Erickson sent an email to several graduate students asking them to respond to a short survey about lab courses they had taught. Based on the survey responses Nathan put together the following comparison of introductory physics labs at UT here.

General Questions/Points of Interest

• Is a final exam essential? Many labs do not have a final exam. If there is a final exam should it be all or partially a lab practical (students do an experiment in the exam)?
• Are prelabs essential? Many labs do not use prelabs. If there are prelabs are they being used effectively? (and what is the goal of a prelab?)
• Most labs use informal (fill in the blank) style lab reports. This is surprising.
• The best lab is usually something enjoyable for students to do and/or a lab related to the students’ field of study (engineers BUILDING circuits, premeds learning about polygraphs). The best lab is not necessarily the lab with the smallest error or cleanest result.
• In Nathan’s class the semester grade is on average 10% higher for students who had physics in high school than for students with no prior physics experience all other things being equal.

Common Difficulties Across Courses

• Lab manuals are written by physics profs and physics TAs. As physicists we don’t know what concepts are most useful to premeds or even really to engineers.
• There is zero communication between the lab TAs and the lecture profs. TAs don’t know what knowledge students have coming into lab (this problem is confounded by a single lab section containing students from multiple lecture sections taught by multiple profs).
• TAs don’t know what the goal of the lab course is. Is it to teach students to use equipment and make accurate measurements? Is it to teach analytic/deductive reasoning? Is it to reward hard work and teach students perseverance (a “weed out” class)? Is it to demonstrate that what the book and the prof say really is true? If the TA can’t answer this question there’s no chance a student can answer it.
• If there are aspects of teaching a TA needs to improve on (ex. TA sits at his/her desk too much and should walk around the room and interact more) no one is telling the TA. Head TAs feel uncomfortable critiquing other grad students’ teaching and no one else is checking on TA performance.

Possible Suggestions

• Lab manuals (and the activities themselves) could be co-written by a physics prof and biology or engineering prof (or TAs instead of profs)
• Get lab TAs into the meetings between the lecture prof and the discussion TAs so everyone can work together. Restrict what lab sections a student can register for based on what lecture section the student registers for. This way all students in a single lab can come from the same lecture professors and at least all students are on the same page even if lab is still ahead or behind lecture.
• Again get lab TAs into the meetings with the lecture prof and the discussion TAs. Lab TAs can emphasize whatever the prof wants we just need to know what the prof wants.
• Add an additional task for the lab supervisor: observe each TA once during the semester and discuss the observation with the TA afterwards.