Lewandowski Group

Our Advanced Lab course (PHYS 4430) includes a variety of guided modern physics labs, including a magneto-optic trap for atoms, a muon lifetime experiment, various optics labs, and others. Additionally, the course includes a five-week student designed project. The course learning goals were developed through a faculty consensus process. The original detailed goals, as defined in 2011, can be found below under "Related Files."

Over several years, we engaged in a systematic overhaul of Physics 3330, Electronics for the Physical Sciences (aka J-lab), which is an upper-division required course for all physics and engineering physics majors.  The ideas used to guide the changes arose from structured discussions with a large number of faculty members (22) in the context of creating learning goals for the Advanced Lab (PHYS4430), the subsequent transformation work conducted in the Advanced Lab course, our own personal experience teaching the J-lab many times, and our experience with electronics in a research-lab settin

During the Fall 2020 term, when faced with the challenge of instructing a large (400+ student), introductory physics lab virtually, we redesigned the entire course to create a unique experience for the students --a CURE. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) involve students in authentic research by engaging students in inquiries where neither the students nor the instructor know the answer.

We transformed our introductory physics lab course to better prepare students for future courses and careers. We began by soliciting input from a variety of university stakeholders including faculty and staff from both physics and the College of Engineering and Applied Science. The consensus learning goals are listed below.

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) was developed as a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. At the beginning and end of the semester, the E-CLASS assesses students' views about their strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes when doing experiments in lab classes. Students also reflect on how those same strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes are practiced by professional researchers.

The Survey of Physics Reasoning on Uncertainty Concepts in Experiments (SPRUCE) is an assessment that is being developed to measure student performances around measurement uncertainty in lower-division lab courses.

The Modeling Assessment for Physics Laboratory Experiments (MAPLE) is an assessment that has been developed to measure students' processes of modeling in Advanced Lab classes focusing on either Electronics or Optics.

The use of lab notebooks for scientific documentation is a ubiquitous part of physics research. These records, documented in physics labs all around the world, constitute the foundational information for essentially all the published experimental results found in physics journals. Without thoughtful and thorough records of experimental progress, it is difficult to imagine physicists successfully navigating the complexities of today's research frontier. Given its importance, the skill of scientific documentation and how it is developed deserves more active consideration than it has to date.

Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals. There has not been much research on why and how we include writing in physics lab classes, and instructors may incorporate writing for a variety of reasons. Through a broader study of multiweek projects in advanced lab classes, we have developed a framework for thinking about and understanding the role of writing in lab classes.

The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a survey that measures student reasoning about measurement uncertainty at the intro physics level. It was developed over a decade ago by Prof. Saalih Allie et al. at the University of Cape Town, ZA. The survey concerns an experiment in which a ball rolls down a ramp and then flies through the air in free-fall before landing some horizontal distance away from where it started.