A First Crack at Introductory Lab for Physics and Astronomy Majors (Physics 181 Lab)

This past semester saw my first attempt at teaching introductory lab for physics majors (Physics 181 Lab at UMass Amherst). I worked with Chris Ertl, leveraging his expertise in developing labs for Physics 131 inspired by Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) common in biology1. In CURE lab courses, students explore authentic scientific questions and share their results with the broader scientific community. Development of such curricula is comparatively simple in biology as almost any soil sample will include microorganisms unknown to the literature.

While true CUREs are difficult to construct in physics, as most authentic physics research questions are beyond the reach of introductory students, we strove to incorporate the ideals of this approach as well as synthesize it with both the AAPT’s Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum2 and the thoughts expressed in Introductory Labs: We can do Better3 article from Physics Today’s January 2018 edition. We also owe a lot to the prior instructor, Scott Hertel. The resulting course focused on the following goals with the aim to make the experience as close to that students will see in future lab work:

  1. Physics-identity promotion and acculturation: The literature is very clear on the importance of the development of physics-identity, particularly with regards to students whose identities are not traditionally associated with physics4,5. We explore different careers physicists purse from the traditional academic/lab roles to comic-strip authors. Within the research sphere, we discuss the different modalities of theoretical, phenomenological, computational, and experimental along with a bit on what the day-to-day lab work is like for each group. Finally, we discuss some practical aspects of being a physics student including the concept of REUs, getting involved in research and TAing including the financial aspects (that you get paid for REUs and graduate school for example). This last point particularly important for first-generation and international students who may be less familiar with the structure of physics education at the university level in the U.S.
  2. Scientific philosophy and values: Students received explicit instruction into some of the fundamentals of scientific philosophy, such as the logical impossibility of proving things true and the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning. Moreover, helping students understand and appreciate that experiments almost never work the first time was baked into the course from the foundations. Students also engage with the fundamentals of modeling: what variables are important, what can be ignored, etc. as they build their own models from their data.
  3. No “cookie-cutter” labs: All the labs had minimal instructions with regards to procedure forcing students to design the procedures themselves.
  4. Construction of their own apparatus: Instructors of more advanced labs had commented that students in these courses were not comfortable with using equipment as basic as C-clamps. My hypothesis was that this discomfort arose from the structure of prior lab courses: historically, students have entered the lab to find the setup already established by the lab instructional team. Instead, we had, the more authentic, shelf of materials which students could use to construct their own apparatuses.
  5. Understanding uncertainties: Students were explicitly taught the difference between statistical and systematic uncertainties in an explicitly frequentist framework. Moreover, students were expected, by the end of the laboratory, to
  6. Refinement of Procedures: Dovetailing with goals 2-5 above, and inline with the recommendations for CUREs, students are always given time to refine their procedures and try again. Of course, refinement takes time. As a consequence, we only did five labs over thirteen weeks with each lab taking two or three weeks to complete.
  7. No “black boxes”: In order for students to achieve goals 4-6, students must fully understand and be able to calibrate their measurement tools. As such, only the most basic experimental tools are used: rulers, scales, protractors, timers, etc. This is in distinct contrast to prior iterations which used a lot of electronic measuring tools. My issue with these tools is that students can neither innovate nor really understand the uncertainties involved.
  8. Exposure to different subfields of physics: As described in Exploring subfield interest development in undergraduate physics students through social cognitive career theory6, many students are unfamiliar with most physics subfields beyond the “popular” upon entering higher education. Thus, we strove to include labs from multiple subfields including astronomy and granular materials etc. to both expose students to new fields and/or excite those who may already have such an interest.
  9. Exposure to python as a data analysis tool: This course is not designed to be an introduction to programming course – we have one of those which comes later. The programming goals of 181 Lab are simply to expose students to a python programming environment and to begin to get comfortable with manipulating data through text commands. I use the pandas python data analysis library due to is superficial similarities to spreadsheets which most students have at least opened and used in a superficial way.

The result of our collaboration was, I must say, one of the most successful first attempts at a course I have had in a long time. While there are, of course, things to change in the next iteration, I am excited to see how this course develops. Once it is more mature, I will create a dedicated page.

  1. Atreyee Bhattacharya, Pamela Harvey, and Perri Longley, CURE | Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) | University of Colorado Boulder, https://www.colorado.edu/research/cure/home. ↩︎
  2. D. MacIsaac, Report: AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum, The Physics Teacher 53, 253 (2015). http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/tpt/53/4/10.1119/1.4914580?ver=pdfcov. ↩︎
  3. N. G. Holmes and C. E. Wieman, Introductory physics labs: We can do better, Physics Today 71, 38 (2018). https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3816. ↩︎
  4. E. W. Close, J. Conn, and H. G. Close, Becoming physics people: Development of integrated physics identity through the Learning Assistant experience, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 12, 010109 (2016). ↩︎
  5. S. Hyater-Adams, C. Fracchiolla, N. Finkelstein, and K. Hinko, Critical look at physics identity: An operationalized framework for examining race and physics identity, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 14, 010132 (2018). ↩︎
  6. D. Zohrabi Alaee and B. M. Zwickl, Exploring subfield interest development in undergraduate physics students through social cognitive career theory, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 21, 020109 (2025). ↩︎