Students’ views of experimental physics after participating in lab courses with open-ended activities

Improving students’ views of experimental physics is often an important goal of undergraduate physics laboratory courses. However, traditional lab courses typically include highly guided activities that often do not require or encourage students to engage in the authentic process of experimental physics. Alternatively, open-ended activities in lab courses can provide students with a more authentic learning experience. Here, we investigate the correlation of open-ended activities in lab courses with students’ views of experimental physics, using an expanded database of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) survey responses from over 30,000 students at over 100 institutions. We show that the inclusion of some open-ended activities is associated with more expertlike postinstruction responses relative to the courses that include only traditional guided activities, and the effect is larger for students with low preinstruction scores. We also find that for courses with at least 1 week spent on open-ended activities, the number of weeks (above zero) spent on open-ended activities is not associated with a pre- to post-instruction gain in the E-CLASS scores. This result suggests that possibly including even a small amount of time on open-ended activities can improve students’ views of experimental physics, which lowers the barrier for instructors to implement such components. These results also suggest that additional research should be conducted to better understand and categorize lab environments beyond simple definitions of inquiry, so as to understand the possible causation mechanisms of labs on students’ views of experimental physics.