Collaborative Research: AID DCL: Community and Resources for Introductory Physics Labs

About This Grant

This project aims to serve the national interest by promoting best practices in introductory experimental physics. This Level 2 Institutional and Community Transformation project will support introductory physics lab instructors to redesign their labs according to strategies proven by physics education research. Physics labs focused on developing experimentation skills improve students' critical thinking ability and views on experimentation compared to labs focused on reinforcing lecture concepts. These impacts are positive for students. This project will create and sustain an Introductory Physics Labs Institute to create community and resources for introductory physics labs. The significance of this project is in developing instructor expertise, implementing educational innovations, and adapting existing educational innovations for specific teaching and learning environments. The project will also disseminate teaching and learning innovations broadly. The project will build and support an expansive community of passionate lab instructors eager to implement effective, experimentation-focused labs at their institutions. Lab instructors will contribute their instructional resources to an online resource created by this project, the Introductory Physics Labs Portal, modeled on existing highly successful portals developed by the American Association of Physics Teachers. The project applies an asset-based agentic paradigm for faculty change. The scope of this project includes expanding models of faculty-driven educational change to the range of roles involved in lab instruction, including nontenure-track teaching positions, staff, and those who supervise graduate or undergraduate teaching assistants. Project goals include generating significant new scholarship about how STEM lab instructors implement experimentation-focused labs, how they become skilled, confident, and reflective educators, and the impacts of experimentation-focused labs on student skills and perspectives. The materials developed in this project will have been piloted at a range of institution types, thus serving a wide variety of instructional contexts and student populations. The scope of this project is to impact about 45,000 students per year (about 10% of the total students taking introductory labs per year). Multiple STEM programs will benefit from lab instructors using high-quality curricular materials and high-impact pedagogies. Lab instructors will benefit from the support offered by the Introductory Physics Labs Portal in improving their lab courses and becoming better teachers. Students in a wide range of majors will benefit from learning with research-based materials and pedagogies. Second-order impacts are anticipated as undergraduate physics students transition into graduate programs and experimentation or data-related careers. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.