Secret objectives: promoting inquiry and tackling preconceptions in teaching laboratories.
@article{Bartlett2019SecretOP, title={Secret objectives: promoting inquiry and tackling preconceptions in teaching laboratories.}, author={P A Bartlett and Kirsty Dunnett}, journal={arXiv: Physics Education}, year={2019} }
In its most general form, a `secret objective' is any inconsistency between the experimental reality and the information provided to students prior to starting work on an experiment. Students are challenged to identify the secret objectives and then given freedom to explore and understand the experiment, thus encouraging and facilitating genuine inquiry elements in introductory laboratory courses. Damping of a simple pendulum is used as a concrete example to demonstrate how secret objectives…
Figures from this paper
7 Citations
Problematizing in inquiry-based labs: how students respond to unexpected results
- Education, Physics
- 2020
Problematizing is a physics practice involving the articulation of a gap in understanding into a clear question or problem. Inquiry-based labs may be conducive to problematizing behaviors, as…
Transforming physics laboratory work from 'cookbook' type to genuine inquiry
- Education, Physics
- 2020
'Cookbook' style laboratory tasks have long been criticised for the lack of critical and independent thought that students need in order to complete them. We present an account of how we transformed…
“Let’s just pretend”: Students’ shifts in frames during a content-reinforcement lab
- Education, Physics
- 2020
With ongoing calls to engage students in science through physics lab instruction, understanding how students frame lab environments informs instructional approaches that promote students’ productive…
Understanding the nature of students’ experience of pre-university practical work in physics
- Education, Physics
- 2022
Introductory practical work in university physics degrees is dominated by highly constrained and instructions-based tasks with limited value for developing students’ scientific and critical thinking…
Not engaging with problems in the lab: Students' navigation of conflicting data and models
- Education, Psychology
- 2021
With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students’ activities as they make sense of their data…
Best practice for instructional labs
- Education, PhysicsNature Physics
- 2021
Undergraduate labs are more effective and more positive for students if they encourage investigation and decision-making, not verification of textbook concepts.
Tanggapan siswa terhadap eksperimen terbimbing pada pembelajaran materi elastisitas
- Physics
- 2019
Pembelajaran diharapkan menumbuhkan pemahaman siswa terhadap materi ajar serta mengembangkan karakter siswa. Karena bidang fisika menyangkut teori, eksperimen, dan terapan, maka pembelajarannya dapat…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 15 REFERENCES
Characterizing the Level of Inquiry in the Undergraduate Laboratory.
- Education
- 2008
Acommon goal for science educators is to engage students in inquiry; however, many factors complicate the completion of such a task. A primary problem encountered by faculty facing this challenge is…
Assessing first-year undergraduate physics students’ laboratory practices: seeking to encourage research behaviours
- Education, PhysicsEuropean Journal of Physics
- 2018
Encouraging positive inquiry-focused behaviours within the constraints of a physics teaching laboratory environment can be challenging. Here, we report on an implementation, the ‘working grade’…
The Role of the Laboratory in Science Teaching: Neglected Aspects of Research
- Education
- 1982
The laboratory has been given a central and distinctive role in science education, and science educators have suggested that there are rich benefits in learning from using laboratory activities. At…
Open-ended versus guided laboratory activities: Impact on students' beliefs about experimental physics
- Education, Physics
- 2016
Improving students' understanding of the nature of experimental physics is often an explicit or implicit goal of undergraduate laboratory physics courses. However, lab activities in traditional lab…
Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content
- Education, Physics
- 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…
Comparative Cognitive Task Analyses of Experimental Science and Instructional Laboratory Courses.
- Education, Physics
- 2015
Undergraduate instructional labs in physics generate intense opinions. Their advocates are passionate as to their importance for teaching physics as an experimental activity and providing “hands-on”…
The Laboratory in Science Education: Foundations for the Twenty-First Century
- Education
- 2004
The laboratory has been given a central and distinctive role in science education, and science educators have suggested that rich benefits in learning accrue from using laboratory activities. Twenty…
A Review of Laboratory Instruction Styles
- Education
- 1999
Through a review of the literature, this paper asserts that four distinct styles of laboratory instruction have been utilized throughout the history of chemistry education: expository (traditional),…
The Suitability of Problem-based Learning for Engineering Education: Theory and practice
- Engineering
- 2000
This article describes the characteristics and aims of problem-based learning (PBL), a successful strategy for higher education. PBL has been implemented as an overall strategy for several programmes…
The Effectiveness of Problem-Based Learning in the Web-Based Environment for the Delivery of an Undergraduate Physics Course
- Physics
- 2005
This paper reports the investigation of the effectiveness of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) within a web-based environment in the delivery of an undergraduate Physics course. The effectiveness was…