Our research focuses on introductory college-level physics labs. What do students learn? How can we help them learn better? And what does learning in the lab offer that learning in lecture does not? We have been developing labs that introduce students to the nature of scientific measurement while also developing a conceptual understanding of measurement and uncertainty, a procedural toolbox for handling and analyzing data, and critical thinking behaviours to reason about data scientifically. We are generally interested in how student epistemologies interact with their learning in the lab and how to foster more productive epistemologies and attitudes. In the future, we plan to examine how the pedagogy we have developed transfers to other disciplines, higher-level lab courses, and to undergraduate research experiences. We are also interested in gender and diversity issues in the lab, given that students spend a lot of their time in a lab working on computers and hands-on experiments.
