Students’ perceptions of changes to the learning environments of undergraduate physics laboratories
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore students’ perceptions to changes to the learning environment of their undergraduate physics laboratories, in which their scientific inquiry processes were stimulated. Design/methodology/approach The activities students engaged in were redesigned to reflect a guided inquiry approach and to acknowledge modern-day advances in science and technology. Further, enhanced guidance was provided for laboratory instructors regarding the nature of scientific inquiry and how to structure students’ inquiry experiences during laboratory sessions. Students’ views were sought regarding their perceptions of the impact of the reforms on the laboratory learning environments, their thinking processes in those environments and their views regarding the reform’s value and appropriateness. Findings Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data suggested that students responded positively to the reforms implemented. Large effect sizes of between 0.70 and 1.20 suggested significant positive shifts in students’ perceptions of dimensions of their laboratory learning environments. In interviews, students expressed that they had engaged in the cognitive processes of scientific inquiry and suggested that the reforms had stimulated such “inquiry” thinking. However, their perceptions of the value and appropriateness of such inquiry-oriented laboratory learning environments were mixed. Originality/value Concerns persist in higher education in relation to the extent of students’ inquiry processes in undergraduate physics laboratories. Reforms to both the activities that students engage in and to instructional strategies are necessary. Raising awareness of the views expressed by students might help inform future reforms that accommodate those views to further enhance similar reforms.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it