Effects of reducing scaffolding in an undergraduate electronics lab

In this exploratory qualitative study, we describe instructors' self-reported practices for teaching and assessing students' ability to troubleshoot in electronics lab courses. We collected audio data from interviews with 20 electronics instructors from 18 institutions that varied by size, selectivity, and other factors. In addition to describing participants' instructional practices, we characterize their perceptions about the role of troubleshooting in electronics, the importance of the ability to troubleshoot more generally, and what it means for students to be competent troubleshooters. One major finding of this work is that, while almost all instructors in our study said that troubleshooting is an important learning outcome for students in electronics lab courses, only half of instructors said they directly assessed students' ability to troubleshoot. Based on our findings, we argue that there is a need for research-based instructional materials that attend to both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of troubleshooting proficiency. We also identify several areas for future investigation related to troubleshooting instruction in electronics lab courses.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electronics lab instructors’ approaches to troubleshooting instruction

Dounas-Frazer

Lewandowski

2017

“…Some instructors have removed all instruction and provide only an experimental goal [18]. Others aim to remove some scaffolding [19]. Other approaches focus on adding explanation and reflection prompts to increase students' cognition and metacognition [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content

Holmes

Olsen

Thomas

et al. 2017

Instructional labs are widely seen as a unique, albeit expensive, way to teach scientific content. We measured the effectiveness of introductory lab courses at achieving this educational goal across nine different lab courses at three very different institutions. These institutions and courses encompassed a broad range of student populations and instructional styles. The nine courses studied had two key things in common: the labs aimed to reinforce the content presented in lectures, and the labs were optional. By comparing the performance of students who did and did not take the labs (with careful normalization for selection effects), we found universally and precisely no added value to learning course content from taking the labs as measured by course exam performance. This work should motivate institutions and departments to reexamine the goals and conduct of their lab courses, given their resource-intensive nature. We show why these results make sense when looking at the comparative mental processes of students involved in research and instructional labs, and offer alternative goals and instructional approaches that would make lab courses more educationally valuable.

“…For the control condition, decisions were mostly made for the students or not mentioned at all. While previous studies attempted to provide opportunities for student agency by removing structure [63][64][65], our results suggest that learning the decision making associated with scientific practice requires some imposed structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Developing scientific decision making by structuring and supporting student agency

Holmes

Keep

Wieman

2020

Scientific expertise is manifested through extensive cycles of making and acting on decisions. To learn the processes and practices of science, therefore, students must have practice with scientific decision making. We argue that this can only happen if students are afforded agency: the opportunity to make decisions to pursue a goal. In this study, we compared two different introductory physics labs through the lens of structuring and supporting student agency. We explore both the role of decision making agency (students are afforded opportunities to make decisions about their lab investigations) and epistemic agency (students are afforded opportunities to generate knowledge). We found that the two labs differed in both the amount and type of structure provided to students: one lab (the intervention condition), with more overall structure, cued student decision making; the other lab (control condition), with less overall structure, made decisions for students. Students in the intervention condition documented, on average, ten times more decisions during their investigations, including more unprompted decisions. In contrast, in labs with less available epistemic agency (i.e., labs where they had to verify or demonstrate canonical models or constants), students in the intervention condition documented fewer decisions than in labs with more available epistemic agency. We associate the improved decision making with students taking up personal agency, based on significant shifts in students' tone as they described their experimental methods (from passive, third-person narratives to active, first-person narratives). Students in the intervention condition also made higher-quality decisions in line with scientific practice. The study speaks to the important nuances between structure and agency in instructional labs and tests the generalizability of previous research on lab instruction to a two-year college population.