Abstract
Understanding student views about learning physics in the lab context can be invaluable for efforts to improve student learning. In an ethnographic study in which two researchers observed introductory physics labs, we found that many women in mixed gender groups adopted the role of group leader or project manager and ensured that the group stayed on task and completed the lab work as expected throughout the semester. Here we report on an investigation of the views about the physics lab of four such female pre-medical students with high agency who came across as group leaders in a traditionally-taught introductory physics lab course for bio-science majors, and who strived to ensure that their group did well in the lab. Our findings are based on semi-structured interviews with these students. The interviews focused on diverse issues including the role of their male lab partners, other peers and the teaching assistant in their learning in the physics lab, their views about learning physics in lecture and lab courses, the role of physics labs in promoting conceptual understanding, learning in physics lab compared with other science labs, and the role of bio-inspired labs in their learning. We find that these female student group leaders had surprisingly similar views about these issues pertaining to the physics lab. We recommend that departments trying to revamp their physics lab courses reflect upon these findings in order to make the labs more effective.
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1. Introduction, motivation and theoretical framework
Introductory physics labs can play an important role in helping students learn physics through experimental techniques and the analysis and interpretation of data as well as supporting the development of their problem solving, reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. Many recent studies have focused on the effectiveness of different types of introductory physics labs in a variety of different settings and contexts [1–7].
However, past studies such as these have placed less emphasis on the experiences, knowledge, values, expectations, and goals of the students who are enrolled in the labs. Cognitive science tells us that it is important to understand what students know and value if we seek to design effective learning experiences for them [8, 9]. Students are the ones who know what they are experiencing and learning vis a vis the goals of the lab course and their own expectations [10–14]. They also have firsthand experience with the extent to which the learning environment in the lab succeeds in aligning lab goals with their expectations and supports their growth as a physics and science person, i.e., as a person who can excel in physics and science in the lab context. Standpoint theory in sociology suggests that students who are experiencing challenging circumstances are in the best position to explain the nature and cause of their difficulties and how to improve the circumstances [15]. Thus, as a theoretical framework for this investigation, we combine the cognitive perspective that understanding student knowledge and values is essential to designing learning that aligns course outcomes and the goals and expectations of students with the sociological perspective that university students are best positioned to articulate the knowledge and values to drive this process.
We focus on the question of 'effectiveness' from the point of view of students in order to understand the alignment between students' perspectives and course learning goals. We view lab learning experiences as effective if they help students move toward their personal goals and/or toward the course goals associated with the lab. The goals for the course include improving students' understanding of physics concepts, learning skills associated with experimental physics, developing the ability to collaborate and communicate physics ideas, and refining students' critical and scientific thinking skills [16–18]. Students' goals for the course included getting a good grade, preparing for the MCAT exam, engaging in personally meaningful physics learning activities, and collaborating in an agreeable and productive way [19]. To illustrate the ways in which we used the term 'effectiveness' during the interviews, consider the following question from our bank of questions: 'what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of these labs? How do they compare with other labs you have done in college or high school?' Here, we are asking students to compare their labs with an eye on how helpful the lab was as a learning experience, as seen through the eyes of a student who experienced the labs. Thus, the question uses the term 'effectiveness' to probe the alignment between the student's experiences in the lab with their perception of the course's learning goals.
Guided by our theoretical framework, we conducted an ethnographic study in which two researchers (authors) observed introductory physics lab courses and also conducted individual interviews with students at a large research university in the US. In particular, individual hour-long semi-structured interviews with 18 students were conducted to understand their views about labs so that they can be taken into account to make the physics labs more effective. Few prior studies have used in-depth semi-structured individual interviews with students to obtain feedback on their views on the introductory physics labs [20, 21]. The interviews focused on diverse issues including the roles of their male lab partners, other peers and the teaching assistant (TA) in their learning in the physics lab, their views about learning physics in lecture and lab courses, the role of physics labs in promoting conceptual understanding, learning in physics and other science labs, and the role of bio-inspired labs on their learning. Since the physics lab is a collaborative learning environment, the nature of effective collaboration [22–24] is a thread that runs through the interviews.
This paper reports on a sub-set of those observations and interviews. We focus on the experiences of women who demonstrated a highly level of agency and acted as group leaders or project managers (or 'Hermiones', to use terminology from [25]). There are three reasons why it is valuable to focus on the experiences of this group of students. First, we note that these students form a unique group whose voices have rarely been heard in a physics context. The design of physics learning experiences tends to focus on the needs of average or 'typical' students, and thus fails to account for the needs of women who are group leaders. Standpoint theory, as part of our theoretical framework, suggests that we ought to listen to these students, in particular, since their needs are not being adequately accounted for in traditional lab instruction. Second, in our ethnographic study, we noted that gender differences in student group work were quite salient. Women often took on certain roles and carried out group work in physics classes in a manner that is not equitable or inclusive, perhaps due to societal stereotypes and biases about who belongs can excel in physics [26–29]. This type of gender dynamic in the context of physics has been referred to as 'doing gender' while doing physics [30–32]. We focus on the women who are group leaders because they 'do gender' and physics in a way that allows them to uniquely maintain a high level of agency as learners. This is an example of gendered task division in the physics lab [25, 33–35]. Finally, we choose to focus on the experiences of women in physics because of the many additional challenges faced by women in physics, which have acted in some cases to decrease women students' self-efficacy [36, 37], identity [38–40], and learning outcomes [41–44].
Thus, in line with our theoretical framework, this study seeks to understand the experiences, values, expectations and goals of women who acted as group leaders in an introductory physics lab. Specifically, we seek to address the following research questions:
- (a)How did these students perceive their (possibly gendered) interactions with their lab partners, other students, and the TA?
- (b)What types and forms of learning experiences did these students value in the physics lab?
- (c)How did the physics lab compare with their other lab courses?
- (d)What elements of the physics lab were engaging, interesting, or effective for these students?
2. Methodology
In order to investigate students' introductory physics lab experiences and interactions, we first conducted ethnographic classroom observations discussed elsewhere [25] and then followed those observations with semi-structured interviews [45] with students in traditionally-taught introductory physics labs at a large research university in the US. The investigation was conducted by the authors, each with more than a decade of experience as a physics educator. Throughout the investigation, the two collaborated extensively to plan, conduct and analyze the classroom observations and share reflections. For the portion of the broader study we focus on here, the participants for the semi-structured hour-long individual interviews were four female pre-medical students with high agency who the authors observed to be group leaders throughout the semester in a traditionally-taught (highly structured) introductory physics lab course for bio-science majors and who strived to ensure that their group did well in the lab.
Since some introductory physics labs are integrated with lecture courses while others are taught as separate courses, we note that our participants were students enrolled in a stand-alone introductory physics lab. This semester-long introductory lab requires the second half of a two-semester introductory physics course as a co-requisite and is often taken in the third or fourth year of students' college study. The majority of students who enroll are bio-science majors with an interest in health-related professions. Approximately 55% are female and 45% are male students. The labs are run by postgraduate student TAs, who are also responsible for grading the lab work. Enrolment is capped at 24 students per lab session and there are several sections running simultaneously in the same semester. Students are graded for completion of their work and, apart from a post-lab exercise, partners receive the same grade for in-class activities. The introductory physics labs have a reputation for being easier than other labs typically taken by students in this course such as the labs for introductory biology, introductory general chemistry or organic chemistry. Students who attend all 12 introductory physics lab sessions typically receive at least a 'B' grade and most receive an 'A' grade. Students in the physics lab worked in groups of two (or sometimes three) to complete the lab procedure during a 3 h period. Our observations suggest that students self-select their partners at random on their first lab session, as they sit down at an open lab bench. The exception is a very small number of students who partner-up before they arrive in the lab. However, we generally see no significant differences in how these lab partnerships operate. Once formed, groups generally tend to stay together unless the TA requires a re-shuffling (not relevant for the investigation discussed here since there was no re-shuffling for students involved in this study).
Based on the ethnographic study described elsewhere [25], we identified students whose perspectives and experiences would include a cross-section of students who enroll in these types of lab classes, and who could articulate their experiences in individual interviews. These interview findings then would be valuable in order to improve the lab. Approximately half of the students who were invited to participate for hour-long individual interviews volunteered to be interviewed. Since our ethnographic observations suggested differential gender effects in group work in the lab with negative impacts on women, we interviewed more women than men. In addition, we invited more students from mixed-gender partnerships since there was more inequity observed in our ethnographic lab class observations in these groups than in same-gender groups. In particular, we observed that students who worked in same-gender groups tended to collaborate with each other more effectively and equitably. Therefore, in our broader study, the pool of 18 interview participants included 13 who identified as female and 5 as male students. This research was carried out in accordance with the principles outlined in University of Pittsburgh institutional review board (IRB) ethical policy with approval number/ID IRB: PRO15070212. All participants provided consent for this research and the names are pseudonyms to protect their identity.
Here we zoom in on the voices of four female students who acted as group leaders in the physics lab. All of the four pre-medical female student leaders who participated in the individual interviews discussed partnered with others in the physics lab early in the semester and stayed with them throughout the semester. All four were US citizens. In terms of race, one female student, Zara, was black (she had two lab partners, one of whom was a male and another was a female student), two female students, Kamala and Janet, were Asian (Kamala had a white and an Asian male as her partners and Janet had a single white male as her partner) and one female student, Natalie, was white (with a black male student as her partner). All students' names are pseudonyms. We note that for these pre-medical students who are intending to go to medical school, physics is a required course and materials related to physics are part of the medical entrance exam (physics makes up 25% of the exam) that students take that is weighed heavily in medical school admission, alongside other requirements [46].
Drawing on our observations, we assembled and refined a list of potential interview questions via an iterative process between the two researchers to serve as our interview protocol. These included questions about the student's background and prior lab experiences; interactions with their lab partners, other students and the TA; thoughts on the structure, mechanisms, and effectiveness of the course; and experiences with task division, including gendered division of labor as well as their views of learning physics in lecture vs lab courses, the role of physics labs in promoting conceptual understanding, learning in physics vs other science labs and the impact on their learning of labs that included biological and medical applications (such as blood pressure, a model of the eye, and an EKG). Despite the long list of questions, we made these semi-structured hour-long individual interviews conversational in nature to give interviewees the opportunity to express themselves freely, dig deeply on critical issues, and remain comfortable. Most participants required little prompting and were very keen to share their thoughts with us openly. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Our potential interview questions are provided as supplementary material (https://stacks.iop.org/EJP/42/035702/mmedia) to this paper.
3. Results
Before delving into the feedback received on various issues, we emphasize that the four interview participants whose views we elaborate upon below had all assumed leadership roles and were taking full responsibility for ensuring that the task got done in the lab each week. In particular, they took initiative to bring back to task those in their groups who were distracted by non-lab related things and delegated appropriate tasks to them throughout the lab to keep them engaged. However, our ethnographic observations suggest that because these women leaders spent a significant portion of their time managing their groups' lab projects each week and making sure their lab partners stayed on task, they themselves were often prevented from having the opportunity to actually dive into the lab activities in-depth; e.g., they did not get adequate opportunities to tinker with the apparatus in the lab.
3.1. Views about their physics lab partners
While these female student leaders recognized that if they did not take on the leadership role, things would not get done, overall they found the lab experience to be more positive than their experiences in their large introductory physics courses in which they felt invisible and had even greater self-efficacy issues. Thus, their stressful leadership role in their group in the physics lab at least made them feel somewhat more valued than their experiences in their large introductory lecture-based courses.
Elaborating on the interactions with the two male students in her group, Kamala noted that 'the lab is set up in such a way that you are forced to interact with other people, which is good' and added, 'but in my group it is a weird dynamic, where the two of them will be unfocused and playing solitaire or something and I will try to be doing the lab.' Then, describing her interactions with her lab partners further, she stated, 'in my group it is my responsibility to know what's happening next usually....They just expect me to know what's happening but that's fine...'. She also noted that both her male partners claimed that she was better at physics than them but she does not think so because 'it just comes down to, are you reading? You should be reading it (lab manual) before..' Thus, Kamala discarded the idea that she was better at physics than her lab partners and attributed her ability to get the lab work done successfully to her efforts and preparation before coming to the lab. Similar themes were echoed by the other women leaders.
Also, interviews suggest that none of these women felt that they had developed a good grasp of physics either from their lectures or from the lab. In fact, despite their leadership role in their group, interviews suggest that these women often had lower physics self-efficacy than their male peers and let their male partners do most of the tinkering with the lab equipment. For example, explaining why one of her lab partners does the majority of the tinkering Kamala noted that her impression was that he was extremely adept at handling equipment and, therefore, he did well tinkering even without reading the lab manual. Similarly, expressing a gendered view about physics learning, Zara said, 'when you are first getting into it, you do look around at your other guy friends or whatever, and there's maybe a subject that they understand and you are just not getting it, and you feel like maybe this is not something for me.' Zara also admitted that in physics 1, which was a lecture-based course, she felt even less confident than in the lab, stating 'it felt like a lot of the other people in my class were getting it and understanding it. And I was not.' She felt better about her standing in the physics lab due to her leadership role than in the physics lectures, acknowledging, 'I am kind of the leader of the group. If I was not there, it would be a detriment to the rest of the group.'
Zara also confessed that she had taken on the role of the group leader because of lack of interest from her physics lab partners stating that they were often not prepared for the lab and it became her responsibility to understand the lab and make sure her group completed it. Then she admitted that '... I think those aspects made it difficult' for her. However, she then added, 'I feel like in some ways I enjoy the lab more than my partners. So to get through the lab and to understand it and do it, I end up delegating I guess...'. She further elaborated on how she motivates her often unfocused lab partners to do the tasks that she delegates to them by reminding them that if they finish the lab early, they can get out before the end of the three hour long lab period, stating, 'I think both of them want to get out of the lab... so if I do not say, come on guys, let us go, it will just prolong the whole process of doing it...'.
Zara also had some suggestions for how instructors may be able to increase individual accountability in physics labs, saying, 'I was thinking, maybe, I do not know how well this would work, if it was a group of however many, if each partner had to do their own part. You know what I am saying? I do not know if this would end up happening, but if each partner had to be the leader for each part, that would get more people engaged. But I do not know how I would implement that into the groups without one person being like, oh, I understand it I will do all the leadership...'. She also wondered whether physics labs could potentially make each student more individually accountable by reflecting on how each person was responsible for certain things in her anatomy lab: 'in anatomy, we learn about all the different muscles. In the lab practical, we have models and we have to identify muscles, where they start and where they end on the body. So if there was a lab practical for a physics lab, you would take a section of the physics lab, (e.g.,) circuit thing, and each student would have to show you how to do one of the circuits, direct or...'.
Natalie's views about her lab partner were similar. Reminiscing about her interactions with him and why she ended up becoming the group leader, she said, 'the way I understood him, he was just there to get it done and leave...'. She then added that because he did not put in the effort, she had to step up her contributions in each lab in order to make sure the lab was completed appropriately. Natalie further noted that her lab partner was totally against spending any time on optional lab activities that would have helped them with better conceptual understanding of the underlying physics. She stated that, since she wanted to develop a deep understanding of physics, at the beginning of the semester she did optional analysis questions in the lab manual but her lab partner was upset and said that there was no reason to do those and so she reluctantly gave up on that part. Elaborating further on her partner's attitude, Natalie said that it was not just her partner who did not care about learning in the physics lab and emphasized that this type of attitude was typical of students in the physics lab particularly because there was no individual accountability. She stated, 'I know there were a lot of people that had that same idea. They just wanted to get in, get it done with, and they were not really getting much out of it.'
Janet's reflection about her lab partner also falls in the same category as the other interviewed women leaders. She said, '... he is not too involved, and I have to push him to do it.' Janet also stated that she cared about learning physics in the lab. She also tried to justify her partner's attitude toward the physics lab by confessing that many students in her class do not care about the physics lab particularly because of the way it is structured and incentivized, saying, 'the attitude of students in the class about physics lab, it is more so about just finishing the lab and less so about actually learning something.' She further elaborated on the students' general attitude in her physics lab, saying 'oh, let us just get these numbers and get out of here. So no one's really understanding, if this circuit is connected improperly, how can we fix it? People just want answers. They do not want to think about it themselves.'
Janet further reminisced about her relationship with her lab partner who wanted to do the minimal amount of work and who insisted that they ask the TA about every question that came up as soon as the opportunity arose so that they did not have to think about anything. She said that he insisted that this way they could get done more quickly with the physics lab without needing to apply themselves, stating, 'my lab partner and I have a different dynamic. But then I would push him to be like, okay let us try this. It would be better for us to just figure it out on our own rather than just ask for answers.' Janet also felt that the incentives for individual accountability and learning physics were very low in the physics lab, which dis-incentivized students from applying themselves. She also suggested that group work in the lab would work well if 'they also want to take something away from this lab, to learn something so they can apply it somewhere else. It is hard to get that mentality in other students. You know what I mean?' Individual accountability is indeed important if we want all students to engage in positive inter-dependence and make an effort to learn from the group work.
Janet also noted that her physics lab partner at least did things when she asked him to do something and that, in comparison, she had much worse experiences in other past labs, stating, 'physics lab is not the best, but it is also not the worst. I have had worse experiences (in different lab courses) because my partner would not do anything'. Then she reflected on her views of what a good lab partner would be like saying, 'I feel like a good lab partner should be someone who has the same goals as you with regards to what they want to get out of the class.'
3.2. Views about peers in other groups and TA in learning in physics lab
Interviews suggest that these female student leaders in the physics lab felt that working with other students not just in their group but in other groups often worked even better than asking their TA for help in clarifying their doubts and it greatly reduced their difficulties. They felt that not only were their peers in other groups more readily accessible but since other students had just encountered those difficulties recently, they often understood their difficulties better than the TA. Also, other students' explanations were often better than the TA's since they explained to them at the level they could understand them. For example, Zara noted, 'just because the TA is not always around, especially if the lab is a little bit more difficult, it is hard for him to get around to all the groups when we all have questions. So working with the other group is really helpful.... I think hearing it from a student, they are on the same level as you, they understand where you are coming from, so it definitely helps to hear an explanation from a student instead of a TA.' Then she added that she was always happy to reciprocate, stating, 'if they are struggling with a part that we have already done then we will help them, and it is back and forth.'
Zara also stated that she often liked to double check with peers in other groups and get their perspective on the experiment they were conducting each week, stating, 'it is definitely helpful to get another perspective, especially if my partners also do not understand what we are doing or the part of the lab that we are doing, then the other group always happens to know something that we do not. And sometimes we will know something that they do not.... I think it is really collaborative, and even better in that we are both trying to figure things out.' Encouraging students to take advantage of the expertise of peers in other groups could further motivate students to engage in such productive discussions and help students from both groups [22–24, 47, 48].
Regarding their TAs, these female student leaders generally had positive things to say; however, sometimes they felt that the TAs were not adequately prepared. In particular, they sometimes found the TA's instructions to be confusing and preferred to ask their peers for help. For example, Natalie felt that the TA did not have a very good understanding of the lab and he did not even think about and try the lab out carefully before the lab like he should have. Expressing her concerns, she stated, 'he seems to have an understanding of the lab generally but not in depth.' Then she added how she would prepare better for teaching the lab if she were the TA, stating, 'if I was teaching the physics lab then maybe I would do the experiment before and go through all the steps. That way I would understand what my students would be doing, and if they got stuck on something then I would have done it beforehand, so I know what should be right...'. Making sure that TAs have actually thought about and tried the experiments ahead of time before the actual lab class is indeed important.
3.3. Lab vs lecture courses
These female student leaders who were interviewed explained how the lab and lectures were different. They pointed out that just because someone was good at concepts learned in the lectures, it did not mean they would also do well in the lab and vice versa. They were also generally disappointed that the physics lab course did not help them develop a deeper understanding of the physics concepts, something that was also very important for their medical entrance exam they would be taking in the future.
For example, expressing such views Kamala noted, 'learning the theory is very different from showing up and seeing the equipment. I learned about what a spectrometer does from general chemistry. But I never learned what a spectrometer is and how to set it up. Those are two different things, right? Like, we have seen pictures...'. Then trying her best to connect what she did in general chemistry to the pertinent underlying theoretical knowledge, she said, 'but my point is... the machine I was talking about gives mass-to-radius ratio of the peaks, right?' Interviews suggest that there may be some confusion pertaining to the difference between a mass spectrometer that separates particles with different masses and the kind of spectrometer students were using in the physics lab to split white light into a colorful spectrum with different wavelengths separating out. It may be useful for physics instructors to explicitly discuss with students that different types of spectrometers may produce spectra of different types of things.
Giving another example from her physics lab about how theory and experiment are very different, Kamala said, 'I have known what a parallel circuit is since 11th grade. But setting it up, sometimes, having that conceptual understanding, it looks so different than it does on paper. When you set it up there are so many wires. I was like, I do not know what's going on.' Then expressing her frustration at the fact that the physics lab did not even help her develop confidence in being able to set up a parallel circuit, she added, 'but I think at the end of it I should be confident I can set up a parallel circuit and I do not think I am regardless of how much theoretical understanding (I have) and how many problems I can solve.'
Kamala expressed disappointment about the fact that the physics labs were such that they did not provide incentive for or focus on conceptual understanding of physics related to the experiments and, instead, were mainly focused on carrying out apparently-meaningless procedures. For example, she said, 'like in optics, you can figure (it) is a diverging lens, a converging lens, where's the focal point? Then when you do this experiment you should understand why an image is flipped versus why it is not flipped, right? But if that connection's not strong enough, the lab is pointless, because it feels like you are just following a bunch of instructions, and you are writing a bunch of stuff down...'. Kamala also felt that the focus on making connections between experiments and concepts that was lacking in her physics lab is more important for physics than for the other sciences that she is familiar with, stating, 'with physics especially, that's so important because so many of the concepts are very abstract.... In chemistry it is easier because you do chemistry for longer, especially if you are premed, we take chemistry in high school. So we are more comfortable with the subject in general. And because it is less particle-based, and you can see a color change or you can feel heat, so you can feel things going differently, whereas in physics... even in my lab partners I can see that. They might do okay in exams and stuff, but translating that is harder in physics than in chemistry for most people.' These types of concerns from students about carrying out meaningless procedures and not getting much out of the physics lab should be taken seriously.
Out of all the four interviewed female students, Zara appeared to be most guarded about not blaming others for her not learning satisfactorily in the physics lab or lecture courses. She described how labs were different from lectures and the inevitable frustrations pertaining to getting things to work in the physics lab, noting that, 'I do not know how to prevent the frustration of doing the labs, because it is something you have to figure out. But you can give guidance to an extent, you can ask questions and stuff, but at the end of the day it is trial and error. You have to do it and see if it works or not.' She also explained why she liked the physics lab much more than physics lectures, stating, 'I definitely think the lab is my favorite part because, like I said, it is a lot more collaborative, it is a lot more hands-on. The stuff you learn in lecture, or even just in the lab manual, it comes to life. It is like, yeah, physics can be fun.... I think it is interesting because compared with before where I did not know anything about physics, now I am helping my group navigate it.' It is clear that despite the burden of being the project manager for her group, Zara takes pride in being the group leader and has a higher self-efficacy in physics lab than lecture.
Natalie also felt that she liked the physics lab better than physics lectures, stating, 'I know that I benefited from that because I do not do well in lectures. I tend to space out sometimes.... But with the hands-on portion I was able to interact with it so I got a better understanding with it.' However, she also expressed frustration at the fact that there was no incentive in the lab for reflecting on and making connections with physics concepts, stating, 'most of the time it would be, okay, this happened, just write it down. And I did not have a lot of time to really integrate with that information.' She also felt that it would be good for the TA to be involved in helping students make the connection between the experiment they were doing and what it meant conceptually: 'maybe if the TA somehow integrates it, explains it to us in more of a conceptual base, that might help us understand the lab...'. Natalie then reflected on her introductory physics lecture class and stated, 'I understood a lot of concepts, I did not really learn as much as I could have...'. She also felt compelled to contrast the traditional lecture approach with how she learns quantum on her own, a subject that she is very interested in, stating, 'the way I learned quantum is, I hike a lot. So I was hiking with a bunch of my friends. We would just sit and discuss these concepts and string theory and talk about quarks and leptons and stuff like that. We would just talk about it because we were interested. And we would throw different ideas and throw different hypotheses: big bang theory, why the Universe expands, wormholes. And it was very conversation-based. We did not do a lot of calculation. It was not talked-at you. It was a conversation. It was really cool.' Reflecting back on her introductory physics lecture courses again, she recapitulated why she found them ineffective, stating, 'but with the lecture it was almost dry sometimes. It was, you have a ball falling out of a plane. It is going to do this because of gravity... I understand the concepts very well, I did not understand the equations very well and why they integrated in that.' Thus, Natalie emphasized that she would have liked more meaning-making opportunities both in physics lab and lecture.
3.4. Understanding physics concepts
As discussed in the previous section, these female student leaders who were interviewed, valued learning physics concepts and felt that the physics lab fell short of helping them develop a deep understanding of the underlying physics concepts. They felt that the lab was too focused on plug-and-chug approaches and getting the experiments to produce the data and then plugging the numbers into the physics equations to get an answer. For example, Kamala noted, 'the lecture gives you the actual equations and the calculation background. But if we come and see this random machine.... If the point of this lab is to get us to problem-solve and troubleshoot, then I think it is definitely doing that. But if point is to get us to understand how the physics is applying to the machine, I do not think that's necessarily happening.' Kamala was frustrated by how they were spending all their physics lab time getting the experiments to work but there was not any incentive or focus on understanding what was actually happening and why. Venting her frustration with the disconnect between conceptual understanding and what was happening in the lab, she described her last physics lab experiment: 'in the last lab, I turned the plate 90 degrees and the slit is here, and in the lab it says, now the rays are parallel to what you are seeing. But why is it parallel and how is this set-up making it parallel? I probably could not tell you. Does that make sense? Because there's a disconnect between me knowing what a diffraction grating is and me knowing what the speed of light is and me seeing this machine and knowing how turning something changes.'
Natalie returned to contrasting how she effectively learns quantum concepts via discussion with her learning in the physics lab by elaborating, 'my boyfriend and I just talk about it (quantum) for hours and hours.... I like understanding things rather than just observing and writing things down (as in the lab).... I like having the concepts behind when it comes to stuff.' She also emphasized how learning concepts makes her feel she really has a good grasp of the physics topic and it makes her feel confident, explaining, 'I love understanding concepts, I want to get the most that I can out of it.... Once I understand the concepts, I get confident.' She then made a transition from the physics lab to her college courses in general stating she always likes to think deeply about concepts in her other courses also but the STEM courses often have too much material thrown at students and do not necessarily give them an opportunity to think and understand. Reflecting on these issues she stated, 'I like to apply that to every class that I go to. I want to get the most out of it.... And in STEM there's a lot of information thrown at you. Get it done, move on to the next class. Learn it, get it done with, move on to the next class.' Then assuring herself that she is not alone and students at all colleges are facing similar situation she said, 'not just at Pitt, at every college I have had my friends go to, I have talked to. It is just a lot of shoving down information. You do not really have the time to understand the concepts.' It is important for physics instructors to take these reflections from students seriously and strive to balance the amount of materials covered with providing sufficient opportunity for students to actually understand what they are learning.
Natalie also opened up and described how people she has encountered in life have had very different opinions about her ability to succeed in science and medicine depending on whether they understood her quest to grasp concepts and be challenged or not. She reminisced about the countless times when people did not believe in her ability to be able to do science all the way from K-12 to college and those reassuring times when they actually believed in her. In particular, she said that she asks a lot of questions because she really likes to learn concepts and be challenged. However, many people misinterpret her deep quest for learning and think that she is asking questions because she is not capable of understanding quickly. With sadness in her expression she stated, 'a lot of people told me no. I had tutors tell me I could never become a doctor, I could never go into something like neuro. I could never go into... because I was not smart enough, when I really just was not challenged enough. There's no reason for me to try if you are just going to tell me the same thing over and over.'
Then she reminisced about the science classes that really engaged and challenged her and validated her as an individual who has enthusiasm for deep thinking. She felt recognized in those classes and those courses helped her learn to think like a scientist. Recalling two of those classes she said, 'there was this one class I took my freshman year, brain and behavior. It was my first neuro class at Pitt. And I talked to the professor, she went over something very slowly, she went into depth, she went into all the details. I was able to sit down. I spent the rest of the day coming up with ideas. I went up to her and I started talking with her about all these ideas I came up with, research ideas, with it. And I was really interested in doing that kind of research, there is not a lot of papers out there about it. And there was another class that I took, it was functional neuro-anatomy. We talked about the visual system, and why something did not work. And the teacher gave us time to really think about it. And all of us in the class were asking questions, trying to understand it, trying to work with the material, to come up with different research proposals.' Then contrasting these thought-provoking science courses with other classes, including the physics classes which she felt were not as thought-provoking, she stated, 'and then suddenly we are getting pounded with material left and right... and it just comes in and goes out. You do not really have time to absorb it, think about it, and generate. I think that's a problem with colleges all across.'
Janet also made it abundantly clear that she cares about learning physics concepts, stating 'especially things like flow viscosity and things like that, where we look at that with our blood flow. It is so important to our biology. I feel like all sciences merge together.'
3.5. Comparison of their chemistry and biology labs with physics lab
All of these female group leaders in the physics lab felt that their chemistry labs were the most effective in helping them learn concepts and helped them integrate whatever they learned in the lab with the lectures. They also liked the fact that their chemistry and even biology lab's main focus was not on manipulating lab equipment, collecting data and plugging them into equations to spit out answers, which seemed to be the main focus in their physics lab. A mismatch between their expectations and the actual focus of the physics lab often seemed to frustrate them about why there was such a lack of focus on conceptual understanding in their physics lab.
For example, describing her chemistry lab and comparing it with the physics lab, Kamala noted, 'a lot of chemistry is knowing what reagent to add in excess, and what does not need to be added in excess. And they will explicitly state, i.e., the lab TA, before we start the lab, why are we adding this in excess? Because XYZ reason. Or why are we... even there, maybe there were some points that were lost in translation but even there I felt like I understood more of why I was doing something than I did in physics lab.'
Reminiscing about a physics lab experiment that she already had a good grasp of before doing it, Kamala stated, '... there's some labs that are more obvious to us. Like the eye one, there's a lens. Probably because I have done a similar thing in high school, so this was the second time around, so it is more likely I'd understand. But it was more apparent to me what was happening. We were pumping fluid into the eye, so we could see the lens changing shape, right? So if you know enough conceptual things, like this is a lens, you are more likely to understand why you are doing something.' She contrasted it with physics labs in which she had great difficulty understanding anything due to her unfamiliarity with relevant concepts before doing the lab and the fact that no incentive or support was provided to understand them. For example, about the diffraction grating lab she recently encountered, she stated, 'especially when we encounter a machine like we did this past week, there's really nothing in your past education that shows you what this machine is supposed to be doing. At least for me, it was not necessarily clear what we were supposed to be doing. There was a thing you were looking through, and there was another tube, and an angle you were changing. I get that light is hitting this plane that is reflecting back at us, but I think that clarity about knowing this is what's happening was not there. It was kind of magical, right? Like, we turned it and... somehow we got a diffraction grating. But I could not tell you why exactly I was doing each step.'
Kamala also had similar views about her chemistry and physics lab reports and stated, 'our lab reports in chemistry are more conceptual. The questions we are asked are more like, why do you do this? .... It is not like, take this data and do a bunch of calculations and give us numbers. That's what our lab reports are like in physics.' On the other hand, about her physics lab she felt, 'because the evaluation is not conceptual, we are less likely to push ourselves to understand why something is happening'.
Zara recalled that her bio labs motivated all students to understand concepts well by requiring poster presentations, stating, 'the other labs that I have been in are SEA-PHAGES in the biology department.... At the end of those labs, the end result is producing a poster. In that sense, everyone has to understand what's going on because you are presenting it to other people. When you have the poster presentation, one person does one section, and another person can do another section, but they also encourage students to understand the entire poster themselves, too.' Physics departments should also consider giving similar opportunities to students to present in poster format to their fellow students and instructors.
Similar to Kamala, Zara also emphasized how chemistry labs focused on concepts, which she found to be very useful. Reminiscing over the pre-labs assignments in different labs and how the physics lab was different she stated, 'in one of my gen chem labs... you would have to explain things more. Whereas in physics it is like the pre-labs are, like, using equations to figure out an answer.... In the gen chem labs, it is going into detail about how you explain the stereochemistry or how you explain... it is like applying concepts. So even if you did not understand a certain mechanism, they'd take that concept and put it into something else for you to explain, if that makes sense?'
Natalie talked about how much she enjoyed and benefited from her research-based labs in chemistry: 'I really like the research-oriented ones because it pushed me to really use the material I learned in a novel way. I am applying to something that not a lot of people have seen what happens. You cannot predict the results. You really have to have a strong understanding for what's going on in order to apply it.' She particularly appreciated the fact that these chemistry labs were asking students to apply concepts to situations they had never encountered before in any courses, stating, '... it is really trying to push past the boundaries of what you are taught in the classroom, because you have to apply things and come up with new things in order to understand what's going on.'
Recalling her chemistry lab Janet said, 'those labs helped us figure out, oh, that's how you do the calculations based on those numbers based off this data we just collected.' She lamented that in physics lab she does not feel the same connection between the experimental work she is doing and the concepts. It seemed to her that they are just collecting data with one equipment after another and churning answers using physics equations without understanding the concepts. However, Janet acknowledged that she appreciated the few times she was able to discern how physics and chemistry labs connected with each other. For example, she found it revealing that those labs used spectra and spectroscopy in different ways, stating that in the physics lab 'seeing the light and the different spectrum. It is very different from the spectroscopy that we see in chemistry. So I thought that was pretty cool. Seeing a similar machine but in a different way.' Thus, similar to Kamala, Janet was excited about having spectroscopy used in both chemistry and physics contexts. Physics instructors can take advantage of these opportunities to help students reflect upon the underlying similarity and differences between different types of spectroscopic devices/measurements and have students discuss the connections between the chemistry and physics contexts students have encountered.
Janet also expressed great enthusiasm for the connection between her bio lab and research she was doing with a professor, 'I was working with RNA primers.... DNA replication, qPCR. These are things I learned in class and I was like, oh I am seeing this in real life. And that's what the numbers look like, and that's what they mean in regards to what I am learning in class. And I thought that was really interesting, to see that connect is really great.' She was really excited about being able to interpret data and make the connections, stating, 'oh, this is what's happening. I was able to see. I got numbers from qPCR, for example, and that tells me this protein is expressed this much in that area of the brain. And so that tells me those cells in that brain area are being regular to produce this much protein. And then, from that I was able to say, oh, we can see what's being down-regulated/up-regulated in different people. And those concepts kind of connected back to what I learned in foundations of biology. Oh, I learned about DNA replication, I learned about how we go from DNA to RNA to protein. And I learned about how the amount of RNA you make affects the amount of proteins you are going to make. I could see all those concepts connecting to what I was doing in research. And that was very meaningful to me because I was doing something I learned about.' She was disappointed that physics lab did not provide such opportunities.
3.6. Interest in bio-inspired physics labs
All of these female student leaders noted that they appreciated being able to see the connections between biology and physics via biology-inspired physics labs. For example, Kamala noted, 'I really liked the eye one... it is a direct application between optics and light. You can see the lens getting big. You are literally pumping water into it with a syringe. I thought that was very cool but I am biased because I am premed.... We did an EKG thing and ECG. That was cool too.... I am in human physiology.... I was really excited. PQRS waves! I know what valve was closing too! I knew the physiology behind it, so seeing an EKG was really exciting! I think I did it on my partner, or we were doing it on our partner, and it was fun.'
Kamala also said that she would have loved to do more bio-inspired physics experiments that were not among those she actually got to do, 'like learning the mechanics. This is still torque, me moving my arm. But doing an experiment on that would be cool because that's the foundation... especially when most of the students in this class are pre-health in some way.' It would indeed be valuable for physics instructors to take advantage of student interest, e.g., in biology, in developing physics labs.
Discussing how much she liked certain labs that focused on bio themes, Zara said, 'learning about the eye kind of overlaps with the anatomy that I am interested in. Seeing different converging lenses and diverging lenses, how that's involved in physics 2 I think was really cool. And the EKG... it was really cool to see how the heartbeat was looking on the thing. And being able to understand it was really cool too.'
Natalie felt that application-based labs would definitely be the best for students who were not physics majors, stating, 'I know that a lot of students in that lab are pre-medicine. So by making it more application-based to the world, not just medicine, maybe it might have students get more out of it'. Then she described the value of taking a neuro-physiology course at the same time as the physics lab in which she was learning about circuits and how she was able to make the connection between the two course materials: 'the circuit labs I found very useful. I am also taking neuro-physiology right now, which is heavily physics-based, so that helps me apply it to other classes.'
Natalie also reflected on how she was trying to make the connections between her physics lab experiments and what she had learned in other courses but sometimes those connections were not easy to make, stating, 'other labs like... the heart monitor was pretty cool, just because it was applicable to me. The EKG... and I know there's a lot of parts because there's a lot to cover around that topic. But something like the heart monitor, I did not have time to understand why the T-wave was inverted if I put the black electrode on this arm versus the other arm.' It was clear from the discussions that providing scaffolding support to students in order to make these types of connections between biology and physics would increase student engagement since many of them really want to understand those connections.
3.7. Mechanics vs other physics lab experiments
Three of the four female lab group leaders expressed more positive views about the physics lab experiments that focused on mechanics but Natalie was more enthusiastic about the other physics experiments that focused on electricity, magnetism and optics. Kamala noted that without much support for understanding what was going on in the physics lab experiments, she liked the mechanics experiments the most because they were easier than other topics to grasp on her own, stating, 'a diffraction grating, you cannot see the light, you cannot see the rays, you do not know what's causing this. So if you do not know why something's happening, there's really no basis to understand what you are doing. Whereas in mechanics there is. You can see something is falling. You can see something is slowing down.'
Janet also noted liking mechanics labs, stating, 'I really enjoyed the first lab, the roller coaster... you drop a metal ball. Those are really fun because you see the effect of gravity on different weights of the ball. I think something that could be better is, instead of just testing two balls, what if we tested different materials? Like, how does the material affect the weight and all that stuff, and what could you predict as the distances and stuff like that? That's something that's interesting.'
The only student among them who was more enthusiastic about other experiments and did not care much about mechanics was Natalie, who said, 'I know the ball dropped, I have observed gravity my entire life. I do not get much out of that lab.' In other words, Natalie was more interested in experiments that were novel and different from what she had experienced in her everyday life. Focusing the introductory labs on a wide variety of physics topics would serve students with different interests.
4. Summary, discussion and implications
Feedback from students who have taken the lab can play a critical role in revamping and designing effective labs to improve student learning. This feedback can help physics departments refine the goals of their lab courses and make them more consistent with what would be most effective for students with a certain background and future professional aspirations. The feedback can also help instructors understand how to frame their instruction and achieve buy-in from learners in a way that usefully aligns course learning goals with the expectations and values of students.
We have used a theoretical framework that combines the principle from cognitive science that it is important to understand students' knowledge and values with the principle from sociology that students are best positioned to describe the challenges they face and potential resolutions for those challenges. Our investigation involved hour-long semi-structured individual interviews with four female lab group leaders who were enrolled in a traditionally-taught introductory physics lab for bio-science majors and who took on the role of project managers in their lab groups throughout the semester. The ethnographic lab observations that the two authors conducted suggested that these female students who were project managers in their lab groups had full responsibility for managing their groups' lab work and making sure that the lab work was done appropriately each week [25].
We find that there were inequities in group interactions, e.g., some group members such as the interviewed female students stepped forward to fill the vacuum in their lab groups. They became group leaders and had a disproportionate level of project management responsibilities. Although some of them mentioned taking pride in being the group leader, explicit efforts should be made to make the group work more equitable in physics labs so that one person does not have disproportionate amount of burden for making sure everything was done each week by the lab group [25, 33, 35]. One suggestion to make the physics lab equitable that came from the interviewed women was increasing individual accountability and making sure that at least part of the lab grades were assigned based on each individual's effort and understanding instead of collectively for each group. Also, regularly changing group composition may help to reduce certain types of inequities in the group work that was observed. An often-recommended approach is to assign and rotate roles within each student group. Another important recommendation is to not isolate minority students, e.g., one woman in a group with two or three men, since these types of situations make women particularly vulnerable to taking on an inequitable gendered role [49]. Providing both individual accountability and support for collaborative strategies that empower all students to contribute equally could improve the effectiveness of student collaborative work [24, 47] in the physics lab.
Furthermore, due to the aforementioned societal stereotypes about who belongs in physics and can excel in physics, fixing the gendered nature of the physics labs we found in our investigation may also require long term efforts [50]. For example, increasing the representation of women in physics particularly in leadership positions, e.g., in the form of female TAs and professors, could be helpful [51]. When asked what can be done to improve the physics self-efficacy of women like her, Zara said, 'maybe having more women in science, more representation with women professors. Like, seeing yourself in the professors, I think that would definitely help with other female perspectives going into physics class.' The self-efficacy of women in physics lags that of men, and is an important predictor of academic retention and success [52, 53]. Zara's response is revealing and shows how historical societal stereotypes and the lack of female role models in physics impact women like Zara even in physics courses in which they are not underrepresented (e.g., her physics lab for bio-science majors had 60% women).
Although this study focused on a lab that was 55% women, we note that our ethnographic observations of labs that did not include pre-medical students (and thus enrolled less than 50% women) showed similar patterns. In such labs sections, we saw women take on the group leadership roles [25] and have similar experiences to those described by Janet, Kamala, Natalie, and Zara. Our observations suggest that the findings we describe here primarily arise from the culture of physics, and not from the specific context (i.e., an approximately-even gender ratio) in which these four students studied.
The interviews also suggest that the supervising TAs were not always well prepared for the labs or had not adequately thought about and tried the experiments that their students would do each week. Therefore, providing good professional development of the TAs who run the labs and making sure they are prepared for their teaching duties are critical. What is equally important is getting 'buy-in' from the TAs about how to run the lab effectively and equitably for ensuring that the introductory physics lab is indeed functioning as envisioned [54].
Students should also be encouraged to talk to other students in different groups since one TA may not be able to help all groups at a given time. More importantly, as interviews with these women suggest, since other students have learned the concepts recently, they can often understand other students' difficulties better than the TA and provide more useful feedback and help. However, creating a lab environment in which all students (and not only some students) feel comfortable asking their peers in other groups for help without feeling judged is really important. This can be especially important for women who face the challenge of 'doing gender' while also doing physics [30, 31]. The professional development of TAs can again play a key role in creating such an inclusive environment in the lab.
Interviews suggest that the female students typically felt that there was a disconnect between their physics lab and their desire to learn physics concepts, and that the lab was not designed to help them learn physics concepts. These students also expressed that while they recognized that the physics lectures and labs were different, they did not appreciate that the physics lab did not provide incentive or support for helping them learn physics concepts. They felt that the fact that merely being present in the physics lab was sufficient to get a good grade and the fact that the labs were not designed to help students learn physics concepts made many students who already were skeptical about the physics lab even more disinterested and disengaged. The students explicitly noted that they felt that the labs were too structured and procedural. These interviewed students also pointed out that since many of the students in this lab were pre-medical students who had to take the medical entrance exam focusing heavily on physics concepts, lack of focus on physics concepts greatly reduced their level of interest and engagement in the lab. Past research has shown a tight connection between physics interest and self-efficacy in physics [39, 52]. The students also felt that increasing individual accountability in the lab can go a long way in increasing student engagement as well as learning.
Furthermore, the interviews suggest that the physics labs should also take inspiration from chemistry and biology labs that students appreciated significantly more. They found them more heavily focused on helping them learn relevant concepts in the lab context. It is not surprising that chemistry and biology labs' focus on concepts was something that these students aspiring to end up in health professions, who had to take an entrance exam focusing on these subjects, found useful. These interviewed students also pointed out that some introductory chemistry and biology labs required them to do novel experiments that were closer in spirit to authentic research and helped them learn to think like a scientist. This suggests that these students viewed their physics lab as less effective for helping them to learn the critical and scientific thinking skills [16, 17] that were goals of the course. They also felt that some of the labs that required students to present the lab work in the form of posters were effective in ensuring individual accountability in addition to helping students develop the ability to communicate scientifically. In particular, some of them noted that some labs in other subjects promoted individual accountability because, e.g., they required each group member to present a part of the poster to the class but each student was expected to be able to answer questions about any part of it.
Finally, we note that in an era in which interdisciplinary training is more important than ever, thoughtful design of physics labs for bio-science majors can be particularly important for keeping students actively-engaged and providing them with appropriate training. All of the interviewed students noted that they really appreciated the bio-inspired labs and some explicitly noted that they would have liked more physics labs with similar themes integrated in the course. They also wanted the physics lab to help them make better connections between physics concepts and concepts in other areas of science they were interested in. Giving students an opportunity to make these types of interdisciplinary connections should be an important goal particularly of physics labs that are for students primarily majoring in bio-sciences or other disciplines.
Based upon the feedback received from interviewed students, we are developing a new grading rubric that takes into account individual accountability in addition to promoting positive interdependence between the physics lab group members. Rotating group members a few times per semester as well as assigning and rotating the roles of different group members within each lab group are also things we have begun to implement in our introductory physics lab. We are incorporating opportunities for reflections on these issues and activities focusing on effective strategies for physics labs in our TA professional development workshops. We are also monitoring the implementation of the strategies learned in the professional development program by the TAs in the physics lab. Physics departments should reflect upon the consistent views articulated by the interviewed students in order to improve the effectiveness of their physics labs.
Acknowledgments
We thank Russell Clark and Robert P Devaty for insightful discussions and the National Science Foundation for grant PHY-1524575.