In the standard analysis of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) half of the data collected from students is not used. The standard analysis identifies whether students hold expert-like views on experimental physics by comparing students' own views with those collected separately from known experts in experimental physics. However, when completing the survey, students also provide information on how they think experts would answer the same questions. This additional information has been used to construct a measure called Self-Evaluated Expertise (SEE), which is a measure of self-recognition and, therefore, provides insight into one component of students’ self-efficacy, and identity, in relation to experimental physics (Hazari 2010).
In this talk, Dr Fox will introduce this measure and demonstrate, using the publicly available E-CLASS data (Aiken 2021), that it can provide additional information about student experiences in lab courses beyond the standard E CLASS analysis, therefore giving users of E-CLASS a new lens through which to understand their students and courses.
Michael Fox - Senior Teaching Fellow, Imperial College London
Michael has worked on a wide range of projects in physics education research, from workforce development for the quantum industry through to analysis of the process of curriculum and culture change in a physics department. His core interest is in what and how students learn in physics teaching laboratories. This has been informed by his own experience as a student in undergraduate teaching labs through to his PhD research on analysing data on plasma turbulence in nuclear fusion reactors. How to teach experimental physics effectively came to the forefront when he was teaching high-school physics, leading to post-doctoral work on assessing student learning in teaching labs using the E-CLASS and MAPLE surveys during his time in the Lewandowski group in Boulder, Colorado. He has recently taken over as the head of the second-year teaching laboratory in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, where he has started to implement evidence-based practices.
