Measuring the Impact of Introductory Physics Labs on Learning

Abstract

Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 1% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a modified version of one of these lab courses whose goals also included modeling, designing experiments, and analyzing and visualizing data. This modified course used the same sets of apparatus as the previous version, but changed the pre-lab and in-lab activities to focus on developing and testing models with data. The study evaluated the impact of these additional goals and activities. We found that they did not affect students' performance on the final exam.