Using a Research-based Approach to Reform Upper-division Laboratory Courses
            Over the last few decades, research efforts in many disciplines have led to significant progress in understanding how students learn, identifying fundamental principles of learning, and using these principles to guide effective teaching practices. Over this same period, physics education researchers (PER) have focused on introductory physics – making dramatic and valuable progress in both understanding student difficulties and in developing materials and teaching practices to provide more effective and constructive learning environments for those introductory physics classes. Many introductory physics courses are now taught using interactive engagement techniques, achieving significant improvements in students’ learning.
Although most physics majors are required to take an upper-level laboratory course, these courses are seldom effective at teaching students the necessary skills to carry out independent research.  Currently at CU and in most physics departments across the country, these upper-division lab courses are structured around “cookbook” type lab exercises, which list a variety of specific activities and measurements to be completed to arrive at a desired answer. This approach often leaves little opportunity for student reasoning about the content and process of the lab.

Figure 1.
Design circle

Cookbook-type lab courses can have many negative effects on students. There is little evidence that students gain understanding of how to plan and carry out an experiment using these methods. They are not required to consider the parameters that are important for a measurement or how to take into account and minimize the systematic and statistical errors inherent in a measurement. Further, students can leave such cookbook lab courses with a misconception of how professional research is conducted in industrial or academic labs. This could discourage students from pursuing an experimental career path. Also these labs could make the transition to a non-classroom environment difficult because of inaccurate expectations of what comprises experimental work. Therefore this project proposes a systematic, evaluation-based approach to change the advanced lab course in both structure and content to address this deficiency in undergraduate education.       
Our transformation efforts will benefit from and be guided by the knowledge base that has developed out of the work in introductory lab courses. As shown in Figure 1, our course transformation model approaches improvement by considering three main questions:

1) What should students learn?
2) What are students learning?
3) What educational curricula and approaches improve student learning?