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Methodological development of a new coding scheme for an established assessment on measurement uncertainty in laboratory courses written by Benjamin Pollard, Robert Hobbs, Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer, and H. J. Lewandowski Student understanding around measurement uncertainty is an important learning outcome in physics lab courses across the US, including at the University of Coloroado Boulder (CU), where it is among the major learning outcomes for the large introductory stand-alone physics lab course. One research tool for studying student understanding around measurement uncertainty, which we use in this course, is the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ), an open-response assessment for measuring student understanding of measurement uncertainty. Interpreting and analyzing PMQ data involves coding students' written explanations to open-response questions. However, the preexisting scoring scheme for the PMQ does not fully capture the breadth and depth of reasoning contained in our students' responses. Therefore, we created a new coding scheme for the PMQ based on responses from our students. Here, we document our process to develop a new coding scheme for the PMQ, and describe the resulting codes. We also present examples of what can be learned from applying the new coding scheme at our institution. Physics Education Research Conference 2019 Part of the PER Conference series Provo, UT: July 24-25, 2019
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Using custom interactive video prelab activities in a large introductory lab course
The large introductory physics lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder, which serves primarily engineering and physical science majors, was recently completely redesigned to align with new explicit learning goals. One of the learning goals of the new course was to have students enjoy working on physics experiments and to see value in experimental physics as a discipline. Additionally, we wanted to make the student workload consistent with a one credit course. To help achieve these goals, we created custom interactive videos that were viewed by the students before the lab to help them prepare for the lab activities. We present design principles for creating these videos, as well as data regarding student engagement and perceptions of this part of the course. Physics Education Research Conference 2019 Part of the PER Conference series Provo, UT: July 24-25, 2019
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734006
- PAR ID:
- 10137835
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PERC Proceedings
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2019.pr.Lewandowski
