Amin Bayat Barooni

I am a Ph.D. candidate of Physics Education Research (PER) at Georgia State University starting in Fall 2015. Many research-based curricula have integrated laboratory activities; for instance, Realtime Physics, Workshop Physics, the Investigative Science Learning Environment and others. These curricula emphasize minds-on student interaction in contrast to stereotypical cookbook lab activities, in which students are expected to perform procedural steps without any emphasis on student-led design or analysis. Physics teachers may have goals and ideas about using labs that do not coincide with the thoughts of the designer of a published activity. Therefore, a teacher may find that no PER-based activity exactly meets his/her instructional goals. In this situation, teachers could use features of different lab activities to create an activity that does respond to their goals. We have analyzed both research-based and cookbook activities to find reliable codes for categorizing their properties. Additionally, we have used these codes to classify research-based design labs to help instructors to select those that match their instructional goals. As a TA, I teach in algebra-based physics class, a course for pre-med students and other non-engineering, non-physics majors. GSU has a studio physics course, meaning that students sit at round tables to encourage discussion rather than in forward-facing rows as in a lecture environment. Our goal is to ultimately improve students learning gains in this environment, as measured by assessments. In other words, we hope that our pre-med students will enhance their learning about basic, introductory concepts such as force, motion, and electricity and magnetism.