Lab notebooks as scientific communication: Investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research

Stanley, Jacob T.; Lewandowski, H. J.

doi:10.1103/physrevphyseducres.12.020129

Cited by 30 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Our research connects these broad recommendations to physics by providing rich accounts demonstrating their relevance in physics-intensive careers with implications for physics students specifically. For example, our research emphasizes the need for students to learn lab work that teaches handson tinkering skills for their equipment and documentation in a way that others (besides their professor) can access their notes [29]. Since learning these factors can help new hires succeed in physics-intensive careers, we should more explicitly value them in undergraduate physics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hidden factors that influence success in the optics workforce

Leak

Santos

Reiter

et al. 2018

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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To prepare physics students for future careers, educators need to understand the skills and other factors necessary for entry and success on the job. Often these insights are based on CEOs, HR personnel, and managers, who provide broad perspectives regarding successful attributes of new hires. However, such insights are often more general and disconnected from specific jobs than insights gained from entry-level employees who recently transitioned from school to work. Using in-depth descriptive summaries and thematic analysis from interviews with six recently hired technicians and engineers in the field of optics, we explored factors that influenced their entry and success on the job. Six themes arose: documentation, computational skills, specialized learning, question asking, tinkering skills, and navigating cultural differences. We discuss the implications of these themes in both their value to employees as well as integration into the physics curriculum.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hidden factors that influence success in the optics workforce

Leak

Santos

Reiter

et al. 2018

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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“…For example, the visual presence of laboratory notebooks while interviewing graduate students was used to explore students' experiences when learning how to effectively use a notebook for scientific documentation (Stanley & Lewandowski, 2016). In another study, researchers conducted structured interviews with physics professors using the professors' own teaching materials to investigate their beliefs and values about teaching and learning .…”

Section: Engineering Collaborative Interviews Using Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the life grid interview technique in STEM education research

et al. 2019

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Background: Qualitative interviewing is a common tool that has been utilized by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education researchers to explore and describe the experiences of students, educators, or other educational stakeholders. Some interviewing techniques use co-creation of an artifact, such as a personal timeline, as a unique way to elicit a detailed narrative from a respondent. The purpose of this commentary is to describe an interview artifact called a life grid. First used and validated in medical sociology to conduct life course research, we adapted the life grid for use in research on undergraduate STEM education. We applied the life grid interview technique to two contexts: 1) students in an advance degree program reflecting on their entire undergraduate career as a biology major, and 2) students in an undergraduate physics program reflecting on a multi-week lab project. Results:We found that the life grid supported four important attributes of an interview: facilitation of the respondents' agency, establishment of rapport between interviewers and respondents, enhanced depth of the respondents' narratives, and the construction of more accurate accounts of events. We situate our experiences with respect to those attributes and compare them with the experiences detailed in literature. Conclusions:We conclude with recommendations for future use of the life grid technique in undergraduate STEM education research. Overall, we find the life grid to be a valuable tool to use when conducting interviews about phenomena with a chronological component.

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“…This study included a total of 45 students across three sections (17,14, and 14 students, respectively) of the transformed electronics lab described in Section III. Each section was taught by a separate instructor (one of whom is an author on this paper), but all three instructors were aware of, or involved with, the course transformation.…”

Section: A Participants and Data Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

Using lab notebooks to examine students’ engagement in modeling in an upper-division electronics lab course

Stanley

Lewandowski

2017

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but the process of constructing, testing, and refining these models is much less common. We focus our attention on a lab course that has been transformed to engage students in this modeling process during lab activities. The design of the lab activities was guided by a framework that captures the different components of model-based reasoning, called the Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to assess students' written work and to identify how students' model-based reasoning differed from activity to activity. Broadly speaking, we were able to identify the different steps of students' model-based reasoning and assess the completeness of their reasoning. Varying degrees of scaffolding present across the activities had an impact on how thoroughly students would engage in the full modeling process, with more scaffolded activities resulting in more thorough engagement with the process. Finally, we identified that the step in the process with which students had the most difficulty was the comparison between their interpreted data and their model prediction. Students did not use sufficiently sophisticated criteria in evaluating such comparisons, which had the effect of halting the modeling process. This may indicate that in order to engage students further in using model-based reasoning during lab activities, the instructor needs to provide further scaffolding for how students make these types of experimental comparisons. This is an important design consideration for other such courses attempting to incorporate modeling as a learning goal.

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Lab notebooks as scientific communication: Investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research

Cited by 30 publications

References 9 publications

Hidden factors that influence success in the optics workforce

Hidden factors that influence success in the optics workforce

Using the life grid interview technique in STEM education research

Using lab notebooks to examine students’ engagement in modeling in an upper-division electronics lab course

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