Narrative
In short, I would describe my teaching style as very simple, straight forward, and having high standards and expectations. It would be a disservice to my students to have no or even low standards and expectations. I believe that there are three keys to success: organization, dedication, and opportunity. I provide my students with the opportunity to learn experimental physics, and I stress to them that they need to take it upon themselves to learn the material - I can't do their learning. I expect myself and my students to be organized and dedicated to the lab. For example, I do not allow them to turn in work that is wrong or incomplete. Sometimes the lab manual is vague as to how much work needs to be done, so I always require them to do the maximum amount of work. Even though this is a science lab, I also require them to use proper grammer, spelling, and presentation.
Six semesters have gone by now where I have ran introductory physics lab classes, I am on my seventh now, and even though I have a great deal of experience I still go into the lab the night before and I conduct the experiment myself. I do this as a way of being organized, to refresh my memory, and to ensure that I am the expert. Many students don't realize this, but I spend much more time working on the lab than they do. I will do the experiment many more times than what they are required to do, and I will work the experiment and data analysis in different ways. I do this to make sure that I know the material very well, and to make sure that there aren't any problems or questions that I cannot answer.
There is one lab, mass-spring, that always goes really well with one small exception. It should be possible to calculate the mass of the spring from some oscillation data. However, in practice both myself and my students cannot get this to work. It seems as if everything is fine, but the numbers don't workout. After many semesters of thinking about this I think I have finally figured out the problem. My feeling is that this is the result of three things: the type of curve fitting, the type of spring, and the timing technique. With this I have been able to write a protocol to conduct this lab that will minimize at least two of these errors.
There is a fairly new lab that we have added to our courses. This lab involves measuring properties of friction of an object sliding on a track. The lab consists of two sets of experiments, and the idea is very simple and straight forward; however, my first experience with this lab did not go well with the class. Many of the students had a hard time collecting good data and spent more time than what is allocated for the lab. So I did an analysis of the lab, the manual, and my experience with the students, and I was able to come up with a technique to run this particular lab that is much more efficient. Instead of telling the students to do the lab and follow the lab manual as usual, I wrote up a worksheet that went over all of the details very briefly, and it told them exactly what to turn in. It's the same material as was found in the manual, but I presented it differently, and since then I've never had problems with this lab.
In the past, I would give my students pop quizzes to, in part, motivate them to come on time, and to motivate them to read the lab manual before coming to lab, as the quizzes covered material from either the previous lab or the current one. Over time I realized that this system is inefficient: it consumes a lot of extra time, it stresses the students out, it requires a lot of logistics on my part, the vast majority of students come on time even without the quizzes, and these quizzes can only cover a very limited scope of problems. Simultaneously, I was having a very difficult time to get my students to learn how to work with units properly. My solution to all of these problems were solved once I learned about the University's switch to Canvas from Blackboard. Canvas allows instructors to write online quizzes for their students. This system doesn't require much from me in terms of logistics, it doesn't consume time during lab, it doesn't stress the students out because they have a week to work on it at their leisure, and it gives me the opportunity to assign problem sets that: prepare them for the next lab, refresh the material we have already covered, and most importantly, learn how to work with units.
It is my philosophy that a student's grade is his/hers, and not mine. As such, I let each student to earn his/her own grade. In the past we had a very simple grading system; just A-F without any plus or minus marks. So in the past, a student with an 88.6% had the same grade as one who had 81% - B. I can't just give an A by rounding up the 88.6% to a 90% as I feel this is academically dishonest. So is what I would do for students who almost had the next letter grade is I would give them the opportunity to earn it. At the beginning of the semester I would post three extra credit problems to Blackboard, and I gave it a due date at the end of the semester. This gave each student the opportunity to earn one percent of their total grade back for each problem they successfully completed. The problems are straight forward, the questions guide them to the answer, and theses problems cover material that we went over in lab. Needless to say, very few of them attempted the problems, but because the opportunity was presented nobody felt cheated out of a higher grade. I no longer offer this to my classes because the department has reformulated its grading standard to include plus and minus marks, so I feel that it is not needed.
Appendix
The content of any of the items below my be downloaded by right clicking and selecting Save link as...
Mass-Spring
- Mathematica Worksheet Download
Canvas Quizzes
- Sample Questions from Quiz 1 Questions
- Sample Questions from Quiz 3 Questions Histogram
- Sample Questions from Quiz 4 Questions Cartoon
Friction Lab
First in-class Pencil & Paper Quizzes
3% Grade Makeup Questions
- Questions PDF