Description
Research work is often difficult, and often involves significant levels of creativity and novel problem-solving. These levels of difficulty, creativity, and novelty can be difficult to incorporate into traditional exam-type assessment tasks. Project-oriented courses are generally far better suited for learning and evaluating the learning of these skills. Thus, honours projects and one- or two-semester masters level projects are often seen as essential parts of the training for future PhD students. However, while they are excellent vehicles for these higher-level skills, pure-project courses are often narrow and inconsistent in the physics content they cover. Upper-level undergraduate courses can provide an opportunity to compromise between covering an orderly section of a physics curriculum and giving students the opportunity to learn valuable high-level research skills. We consider some approaches to this compromise, with discussion of their impact on long-term (e.g., five or more years) learning of both physics concepts and research skills, and present thoughts on how the learning process can be scaffolded.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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