Impact of traditional physics lab instruction on students’ critical thinking skills in a Finnish context

Abstract

Recent studies have given incentive to physics departments around the world to revise the learning goals of their lab courses to emphasize experimentation skills over reinforcing lecture content. Evaluation instruments have been developed to measure the achievement of learning goals, and one such instrument is the PLIC (Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking). The PLIC measures respondents' ability to evaluate models, evaluate methods, and to suggest next steps for an investigation. In the present work we give consideration to the validity of our Finnish translation of the PLIC and we show results from our baseline study of first-year introductory lab courses with labs mixing content- and skills-related learning goals. We observed no statistically significant change in students' critical thinking skills over the period of our study.

One setup for many experiments: enabling versatile student-led investigations

“…The 6 ECTS (168 h) first year physics lab course (FYPLC) is the program's first course introducing students to experimental physics. Similar to many introductory university lab courses [1,2] and as recommended variously [3][4][5], the main goal is to impart Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.…”