Course Assessments:
SPRUCE: Measurement Uncertainty
SPRUCE is designed for introductory physics labs and is to be administered in a pre-instruction then post-instruction implementation, can be administered outside of class, and takes most students under 30 minutes to complete. Shortly after the post-instruction administration, instructors will receive a report outlining student performance along 14 assessment objectives.
Contact - Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
SPRUCE COURSE INFORMATION SURVEY
MAPLE: Modeling in labs
MAPLE is designed to measure the proficiency of students at modeling in either an upper-division optics or electronics lab course. MAPLE is administered online through two links that will be sent to you, one for the pre-test and another for the post-test. The electronics post-survey involves a basic op-amp circuit, and the optics post-survey involves polarizers. The pre-survey for both assessments uses a pendulum as the experimental context.
Contact- Rachael Merritt - rachael.merritt@colorado.edu, Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
MAPLE COURSE INFORMATION SURVEY
E-CLASS: Views about experimental physics
E-CLASS is designed to assess students' views about their strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes when doing experiments in lab classes at all levels. Students also reflect on how those same strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes are practiced by professional researchers. Finally, at the end of the semester, students reflect on how their own course valued those practices in terms of earning a good grade.
Contact - Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
E-CLASS COURSE INFORMATION SURVEY
Lab Taxonomy:
Contact - Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
Our goal is to start developing an understanding of physics lab courses across the world as a first step in building a community to improve experimental physics education broadly. We’re hoping you’ll take a survey about the undergraduate physics lab course you teach at the link below it should take about 10-15 minutes for you to complete.
LAB TAXONOMY SURVEY
Additionally, we are hoping to reach as many people as possible, so please feel free to send the survey link out to your contacts who teach undergraduate physics lab courses, and you can let them know to send it to their contacts as well.
Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs):
Contact- Rachael Merritt - rachael.merritt@colorado.edu, Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
We are currently in the process of developing a framework of effective practices for the development and implementation of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences, or CUREs, in physics. CUREs are a potential avenue to reduce participation barriers found in traditional research opportunties by providing an entire course of students the opportunity to participate in authentic research experience. Please contact us to for additional information.
Cloud-based BEC experiment
Contact - Tori Borish - victoria.borish@colorado.edu, Heather Lewandowski - lewandoh@colorado.edu
Through an industrial partnership with Infleqtion, we have developed and preliminarily tested educational materials utilizing Infleqtion’s Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) experimental platform called Oqtant. This platform is free and available for anyone to use, and it may allow students at all institutions the possibility of interacting with quantum matter via a real experiment they can control online. We are planning to post a finalized version of our educational materials soon (including two three-hour activities consisting of Jupyter notebooks where students submit jobs to Oqtant and analyze the resulting experimental data as well as preparation activities and instructor guides). If you are interested in being contacted when these materials are ready or partnering with us for research on the use of this remote experiment in your course, please submit your contact info via the following survey
BEC Quantum Matter Service Survey
PhET Simulation with Noise
Contact – Qiaoyi Liu – qili7958@colorado.edu, Heather Lewandowski – lewandoh@colorado.edu
We have helped to develop a new and specially designed PhET simulation named the Projectile Data Lab (PDL) to help students learn about measurement uncertainty by incorporating statistical fluctuations into the simulation. Additionally, the data from the simulation can be easily sent to an online data analysis package called CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Platform) to create an instructional platform. The goal of these new PhET simulations is to enhance or replace hands-on lab activities designed to instruct students on measurement uncertainty. There are several ways you could interact with our project:
- You may interact with our new simulations on your own. Here are the links:
- You may be interested in incorporating these simulations into your courses, either in Fall 2024 or Spring 2025. In that case, we would be happy to help assess the effectiveness of the simulations, either with think-aloud interviews or the use of a validated assessment tool (SPRUCE). If that is the case, please contact us.
- You may be interested in partnering with us to help beta-test new simulations and associated lab activities we design in the future. We are planning to add random noise and systematics to other simulations as well, such as Pendulum Lab, Circuit Construction Kit: DC, etc. If that is the case, please contact us.
PER - Resources for Instructors
PER - Resources for Researchers