The study is a controlled experiment to assess students' ability to transfer knowledge across the physics curriculum The goal of this proposal is to investigate whether laboratories in which students design their own experiments promote the development of certain scientific abilities and foster both near and far transfer. It examines whether some instructional innovations help students in a university science class to develop the abilities that they need for the workplace. The results of this study should provide a significant test of whether or not student scientific abilities can be developed in physics that transfer to a new content area and to a different social setting. The term scientific abilities is defined as the process to be reflective and critical about a problem; it includes designing an experiment, identifying assumptions in a mathematics procedure, collecting data, and communicating results. The project involves an experimental design with 160 students in introductory physics courses taught with a science learning approach. Students are randomly assigned to experimental and control groups that will compare traditional laboratories with student-designed experiments.
