Speaker
Description
Introductory labs often provide students with highly prescriptive instructions, limiting the independence, autonomy, and creativity that students can exhibit during the experiment. When students enter their first physics lab, they also have varying levels of understanding of the concept of experimental uncertainty, how it arises, and how to interpret it.
To address these challenges, the University of Toronto Department of Physics recently redesigned a first-year physics lab curriculum to emphasize experimental design, uncertainty, and data analysis. Instead of running a different experiment every week, students investigate a single experiment over multiple weeks, with data being collected in the first week and then analyzed it in the second. This new model encourages students to think like a scientist by deciding what data to collect, how to measure it, and how to understand their results.
In this presentation, I will discuss the structure of the revised lab, share key lessons learned from its implementation, and comment on how it will be further improved in future semesters. I will also summarize the general trends from student feedback and reflect on how this new model shaped their understanding of experimentation.
| Keyword-1 | First-Year Physics |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Teaching Pedagogy |