Designing (and re-designing) realistic research practices for undergraduate Advanced Labs

Our institution is undergoing a quarter-to-semester transition, which has given our department the opportunity to assess and redesign how our instructional laboratories prepare students for futures within physics and other STEM fields. Currently, our one-quarter Advanced Lab course focuses on introducing students to contemporary scientific instrumentation and includes a relatively short independent research project. While both types of activities give students a taste of some facets of scientific research, they do not necessarily touch on other realistic research skills, such as oral and written communication and statistical and error analysis. Here I will discuss the “state of the lab” and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our current course and how this assessment is contributing to a course and curricular re-design. This scales from upgrading current Advanced Lab instructions to promote more open-ended analysis, to newly implemented activities designed to build writing and computation skills, to a longer-term overhaul of the entire instructional laboratory curriculum.