Assessing students’ views about experimental physics in a German laboratory course

Abstract

Abstract Physics laboratory courses (PLC) have been recently the topic of several research studies examining their effectiveness at reaching their goals. As a result, a discussion about the effectiveness of traditional PLC for students’ content knowledge, skills, and “expert-thinking” acquisition has developed. Critical for the investigation of students learning in those settings has been the development of research-based assessments tools. An example of those is the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Recently, we translated the E-CLASS into German and set up a centralized survey administration system for instructors, allowing data acquisition and automated data analysis. Previously, we described this process and presented the preliminary results of the study of the introductory PLC at the University of Potsdam (UP). Here, we present an extended study that allows us to make stronger conclusions about students’ views about experimental physics at the UP. Overall, we find that students at US institutions have a higher level of “expert-like” views than students at the UP.