This project supports a two and a half-day Topical Conference on the Advanced Laboratory held in conjunction with the summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The conference brings together a dispersed community of faculty and technical staff from our nation's colleges (including two year colleges) and universities who direct the intermediate and advanced laboratories - labs that are not taught with the introductory physics courses.
The goals of the conference are to give participants an understanding of the wide variety of curricula used in advanced labs, a knowledge of and hands-on experience with new or improved experiments and techniques, methods for assessing student understanding in advanced laboratories, techniques for integrating undergraduate research with advanced labs, a knowledge of commercially available equipment appropriate for advanced labs, and a broader view of teaching strategies and pedagogy for the laboratory.
Intellectual Merit: During the workshop, participants explore all aspects of the challenge of teaching the advanced laboratory, while listening to speakers, participating in workshops, presenting results, and engaging in dialog with others with similar interests. Challenges in creating and offering an advanced lab include designing a curriculum that responds to the results of physics education research as well as local constraints, incorporating labs that do much more than repeat classic experiments, introducing students to modern instrumentation, integrating "writing across the curriculum" into the course, and increasing the breadth of experience for students engaged in independent research. The conference provides significant experiences for participants on all these issues.
Broader Impact: The conference allows physicists involved in the advanced lab to identify themselves as an interest group that can lead to an increased exchange of information about the intermediate/advanced experimental physics curriculum. The project is using a pre-conference survey to assess the advanced lab interests and experience of the participants and a post-survey to assess the overall effectiveness of the conference. The proceedings are being published electronically and included in enhanced content on the advanced lab section of the digital library comPADRE.
