Sense of agency, gender, and students’ perception in open-ended physics labs

Abstract

Instructional physics labs are critical junctures for many STEM majors to develop an understanding of experimentation in the sciences. Students can acquire useful experimental skills and grow their identities as scientists. However, many traditionally-instructed labs do not necessarily involve authentic physics experimentation features in their curricula. Recent research calls for a reformation in undergraduate labs to incorporate more student agency and choice in the learning processes. In our institution, we have adopted open-ended lab teaching in the introductory physics courses. By using reformed curricula that provide higher student agency, we analyzed approximately 100 students in the introductory-level lab courses to examine their views towards the open-ended physics labs. Between the start and the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant shift in students' perceptions about the agency afforded in lab activities. We also examined students' responses to "Which lab unit was your favorite and why?". The analysis showed that majority of the students preferred Project Lab, which had the highest student agency and coding analysis showed that "freedom" was the most frequent response for students' reason for picking Project Lab. Finally, we also examined student views across gender and found no significant gender effect on students' sense of agency.

Investigating relationships between emotional states and self-efficacy, agency, and interest in introductory labs

“…Items corresponding to self-efficacy were provided to us by Z. Yasemin Kalender and N. G. Holmes and items for sense of agency appear in Ref. [6], all intended for the context of physics labs. Each item has a five point scale ('strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree') and there are 11 items corresponding to self-efficacy and four to sense of agency.…”

“…To score participants' self-efficacy and sense of agency data, we used Kalender et al's method of averaging items with equal weightings so that each participant scores from 1 (low) to 5 (high) [6]. For emotional state data, we treated each state individually on a scale from 0 (never) to 3 (always).…”

“…Other studies have begun to expand to other affective experiences of students in physics labs. For example, Kalender et al began to investigate relationships between students' sense of agency, intended to be increased in many experimentation-focused labs, and their preferences for lab activities [6]. They found that in experimentationfocused labs, students reported increasing sense of agency and their favorite lab activity was the one designed to have the most available agency.…”

A Hands-on Guided-inquiry Materials Laboratory that Supports Student Agency

“…We also added two items related to surprise and novelty. Kalender's original 4-item assessment has been validated elsewhere (Kalender et al, 2020). We calculated Cronbach's a for the sense of agency items (a = 0.72) and self-efficacy items (a = 0.80).…”

Transforming laboratory experiments for digital teaching: remote access laboratories in thermodynamics

“…(i) Laboratories provide the students with the possibility to engage in authentic scientific practise [4]. ( j) Laboratories help the students to develop their identities as scientists [5]. (k) Laboratories allow the students to immediately analyse failures and improve the experimental design.…”