Speaker
Maxim Bychkov
(University of Virginia)
Description
At the college level, introductory physics laboratory courses for non-majors present an interesting set of pedagogical challenges. With such large enrollment courses, the administrative load on the instructor is high, the motivation of the students is often low, and the scientific and mathematical background levels vary widely from student to student. Misunderstandings are also bound to arise; due to the large number of sections, instructions often cannot be delivered by the instructor of record and are filtered through Teaching Assistants.
Since returning to in-person classes in the Fall of 2021 at the University of Virginia Physics Department, my introductory laboratory courses have seen a continuous decline in all student satisfaction markers used to evaluate the quality of instruction. This trend prompted me to reevaluate the courses and look for ways to address the challenges highlighted above. I started by analyzing students’ evaluations to find the most disliked aspects of the course. Group report writing and the perceived arbitrariness of report grading were at the top of the list.
In response to this feedback, I converted all lab reports into an automatically graded series of assignments using WebAssign. To do this, I wrote a relatively complicated Pearl code that allows students to enter their individual experimental data, which is checked by the system for consistency. The subsequent questions (multiple choice, symbolic, numerical, etc.) are graded on correctness, with values that depend on students' entered data. In this new system, students complete all out-of-class assignments independently, and all grading is automatic and transparent.
In this talk I will give a brief overview of the course’s past and current structures, will show several examples of the new auto-graded smart assignments, and will show plots that demonstrate the improvement in students’ attitude towards the course -- improvements that were achieved by streamlining the flow of the course for both students and instructors.
Primary author
Maxim Bychkov
(University of Virginia)
Co-authors
Elizabeth Larson
(University of Virginia)
Prof.
Jongsoo Yoon
(University of Virginia)
