Labs During a Pandemic

The Sankey plot shows the change in learning goals of the instructors who completed the instructor survey from before (left side of plot) to after (right side of plot) remote instruction.

Laboratories are an important part of the undergraduate physics curriculum. They allow for hands-on learning in complex, collaborative environments involving various technical equipment and low student-to-teacher ratios. However, due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, a multitude of colleges and universities across the U.S. transitioned to teaching labs remotely. We seek to measure the impact of this transition on student learning in lab courses, document the creative approaches to teaching remote labs, and assess the effectiveness of remote lab teaching strategies. We collected survey responses and interview data from students and instructors across the country as well as took an in-depth look at student experiences in a large, introductory-level, remote course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that we designed for CU Boulder students.

 

 

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