A Non‐Traditional Approach to the Evaluation of Laboratory Instruction in General Physics Courses

Abstract

Summaries English Instead of the traditional evaluation approach to laboratory instruction in physics courses, which usually focuses only on the graphs, tables and numerical values obtained by the students in their experiments, a rather different approach was used in an introductory course in electromagnetism. This approach focused on the identification of the telling questions, the key concepts and the basic phenomena involved in the experiment, on the description of the method used, and on the results also. The outcomes of the study apparently indicate that many students perform an experiment without having a clear idea about what they are doing. They are not able to identify the basic question, concepts and phenomena embedded in the experiment and, in addition, they do not see experimentation as a process of making knowledge.