Can weekly workshop physics labs change strongly held student misconceptions?

All science majors at UBC's Okanagan campus are required to take two terms of first year physics. For the past three years students in the entrance-restricted algebra-based stream have performed poorly on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) held annually prior to the first (week 3) and last (week 11) lab sessions of the first term course, showing only moderate gains with persistent misconceptions despite group problem solving tutorials, the adoption of new physics education-based texts, online interactive homework, the daily use of clicker questions and two-stage testing. For the 2017W1 term this stream was repackaged as an unrestricted entrance calculus-based physics for the life sciences, with new (or reworked) labs focused on challenging the most strongly held student misconceptions. Here we report the results of our most recent FCI student survey, and whether this approach proved effective in its first semester of implementation.