Lewandowski Group - Epistemology / Ownership
Epistemology / Ownership
Students' epistemological beliefs about physics (their beliefs about the nature of knowledge and what it means to know, learn, and do physics) can impactÌýlearning, interest, and experiences within the discipline of physics. As such, supporting students' epistemological development is a major area of research within physics education, including in laboratory environments. This can include students' general attitudes towards experimental physics, beliefs about how the process of experimental physics works, sense of agency and confidence to conduct experiments, and more.Ìý
We conduct research about students' attitudes and beliefs about experimental physics usingÌýthe Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS), a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. The E-CLASS assesses students' views about their strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes when doing experiments in lab classes and can be used to investigate students' perceptions of the gap between classroom lab instruction and professional research.ÌýÌý
Related to students' attitudes about experimental physics is whether they feel a sense of ownership over their project or experiment in a lab course or research experience.ÌýÌýOwnership can include feeling responsible for, committed to, and personally connected to the project or experiment. Features of students' experiences that promote this are (i) interest, (ii) demonstrating agency,Ìý(iii) expressing positive affect, (iv) demonstrating a willingness to contend with challenges, and (v) working productively with others. We have conducted research to explore students' ownership in project-based lab courses.Ìý
Related Publications
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Promoting students' sense of ownership over their work is an important aspect of learning, both in instructional and research settings. The importance of ownership is recognized by many instructors and advisors to be an important outcome of their students' efforts. However, for many instructors and researchers, what it means to have a sense of ownership may be understood only in broad and surface-level terms. In physics, one promising venue for engaging students in projects over which they feel ownership is the instructional lab course. However, the way ownership manifests as well as how it is developed has not been well studied within the PER community.
In the broader science education environment outside of PER, there have been efforts to define ownership and identify features of students' experiences that promote it. Ownership can be defined as consisting of three aspects: feeling responsible for, committed to, and personally connected to the project. Features of students' experiences that promote this are (i) interest in the project, (ii) demonstrating agency in managing the project, (iii) expressing positive affect about the project, (iv) demonstrating a willingness to contend with challenges, and (v) working productively with others.
However, how ownership of one's project manifests may depend largely on the context in which it is experienced. For this reason, we investigated how ownership manifests for students in the context of upper-division physics lab courses that have open-ended projects as a central part of the course.
Project-Based Lab Courses
The courses we studied focused on topics in contemporary optics and had a seven-week-long project. The design of the courses was anticipated to promote student ownership: the projects were chosen by the students, were informed by research, had minimal scaffolding, and were directed by the students themselves. Through pre- and post-project interviews as well as weekly student reflections (all designed to probe for the presence of the features anticipated to promote ownership), we outlined how student ownership manifests in this environment. The aim of these efforts was to broaden the framework of ownership to encapsulate the physics lab context.
