Speaker
Description
Physics laboratories should be where students learn to think like experimental physicists: ask questions, design experiments and perform reliable measurements, critically evaluate evidence, troubleshoot problems, and communicate results clearly. In practice, many labs can evolve into something closer to recipe-following. Over years of well-intentioned refinement, often to remove ambiguities, manuals have become so prescriptive that students can complete experiments without making a single genuine decision. Assessments can reward completeness over understanding. Demonstrators, often new each semester and with minimal pedagogical preparation, default to checking that the right numbers appear in the logbook. The result is an environment that systematically discourages independent thinking.
This talk draws on a year-long audit of a second year laboratory at the University of Sydney to examine how these problems arise, why they are self-reinforcing, and what it takes to begin dismantling them. We describe a pilot redesign of experiments, what it revealed about the gap between our intentions and students' actual experiences, and the broader changes to assessment and demonstrator practice that followed. We also discuss the unexpected difficulties: scaffolding that helps too much, learning goals that remain invisible despite being written down, and the challenge of shifting a teaching culture when the existing system feels safe and familiar.
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