Evaluating digital experimental tasks for physics laboratory courses

Abstract

As physics laboratory courses are an integral part of studying physics, many approaches have been pursued to evaluate their quality e.g., regarding the improvement of conceptual understanding, the students’ motivation, or the acquisition of adequate concepts about experimental physics. So far, most approaches either evaluate laboratory courses in their entirety like a course evaluation or focus on the students’ development of (specific) competencies. However, even though experimental tasks are the backbone of any laboratory course concept, specific instruments to evaluate individual experimental tasks are missing. Both approaches mentioned above are unsuitable for that aim since typical laboratory courses consist of multiple tasks and the development of competencies takes place on a larger time scale than the execution of individual tasks. Thus, as part of the Erasmus+ project DigiPhysLab (Developing Digital Physics Laboratory Work for Distance Learning), we developed a questionnaire to explicitly evaluate the quality of an individual experimental task. The questionnaire has been discursively developed and softly validated within our project group and is now available in four languages. In this contribution, we share our ideas behind and our experiences with the use of this instrument for piloting experimental tasks.