Sense of agency, gender, and students’ perception in open-ended physics labs

Scientific thinking is any instance of purposeful thinking that has the objective of enhancing the seeker’s knowledge Khun (2011), and involves many independent and critically engaged decision making processes. Scientific decisions may relate to building models, designing experiments, interpreting results, or communicating the ideas AAPT (2014), among others. To make such decisions, agency plays a critical role, where agency is defined here as the capacity to guide one’s actions towards achieving a goal Bandura (1989, 1996). To learn to think like a scientist, students need to learn how to make such decisions using their agency.

Undergraduate labs offer a great opportunity to gain practice with such decision making. However, the curricula of many physics lab courses do not satisfy these goals, because they are highly-structured, procedural, and content-reinforcing PCA (2012). Therefore, in recent years, there has been a growing recognition for the need to reform undergraduate physics curricula to adopt more open-ended and student-centered tasks and activities.

Open-ended (i.e., interactive or constructive) lab instruction can offer students more choice and agency as they engage with the material. Open-ended labs can benefit students in multiple ways, from developing more expert-like attitudes towards experimentation Wilcox and Lewandowski (2017) to developing positive science identities Doucette et al. (2020); Carlone and Johnson (2007); Kalender et al. (2019a). Supporting students to enact their agency, however, is more than simply removing structure. Students must have the motivation and self-efficacy to take up the agency afforded Bandura (1989). In the present work, we studied students’ beliefs and perspectives about the agency in a physics lab course and compared across different demographics.

In an open-ended lab, students have control over what they do and what they find in their experiment. Students have more instances to use their agency to become the initiator of their learning processes Tapal et al. (2017). Affording such agency in lab classes can better engage students in activities that interest them Scardamalia and Bereiter (2006) and enhance their learning of science practices and career outcomes Zeiser et al. (2018). Students who perceive themselves as having agency will have more ownership in their learning Hanauer and Dolan (2014). Students with a sense of ownership will become more invested, engaged, and persist in their work Hanauer et al. (2016); Dounas-Frazer et al. (2017).

Supporting agency, however, does not mean full autonomy on students’ part Bandura (1989). In science education, the goal is not simply for students to make decisions – the goal is for them to learn to make decisions in line with scientific practice Ford (2015). Thus, students should be supported in making their own decisions in open-ended course work  Holmes et al. (2020). The literature on social learning suggests using teaching processes such as modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and then slowly fading support Collins et al. (1987). As students develop higher-order skills and learning activities become more complex, students transition from novices to more independent and expert-level learners  Ericsson et al. (1993); Chi et al. (1981) and they become more autonomous (i.e., higher agency) scientists. This apparent structure may seem antagonistic to students’ agency. Given that open-ended labs are rarely fully ‘open’, in what ways are students aware of the agency afforded to them in labs?

Agency in a lab is also influenced by the learning environment and social-classroom dynamics and hierarchies Schenkel and Calabrese Barton (2020), with such dynamics and hierarchies being imported from the wider cultural context in sciences  Seymour and Hewitt (1997). If one student takes charge in a group, other students might not perceive the agency afforded to them Archibeque et al. (2017, 2018). In particular, members of marginalized groups might perceive themselves as having less agency to participate in tasks or group discourses because of their peers. For example, in physics, researchers have found gendered patterns in students’ roles in lab activities such that female students are assigned to "disempowering" roles Danielsson (2012). The accumulation of many such interactions may impact male and female students’ sense of agency differently.

Finally, a critical question to the discussion of agency is whether students value and recognize the benefit of provided agency in physics labs. On one hand, positive attitudes toward agency in physics can influence students’ reactions to challenges and setbacks Zeiser et al. (2018); Dweck (2008); Elliott and Dweck (1988) and students who view agency as positive can become more active-seekers of new knowledge and feel more positively toward self-learning strategies Bandura (1989). On the other hand, prior literature shows that students in active-learning classes often feel less positive about and see less value in self-guided learning compared to traditional learning Cavanagh et al. (2016), despite the fact that they gain more knowledge in the former Deslauriers et al. (2019).

In this study, we focused on the understudied topic of students’ sense of agency in open-ended physics lab courses. We examined three primary research questions.

• •

  RQ1: How do open-ended labs impact students’ sense of agency? While prior literature emphasizes the importance of agency, there is minimal work on how to actually promote students’ sense of agency. To address this, we examined whether open-ended labs can be one method of increasing students’ sense of agency in physics.

• •

  RQ2: How does students’ sense of agency in these labs interact with gender? As noted above, student demographics can play an important role in how students engage in physics labs activities. To unpack these complexities in the role of agency in physics labs, we tested for equity of parity (i.e., equity of outcomes) Rodriguez et al. (2012); Van Dusen and Nissen (2019); Burkholder et al. (2020) to examine whether men and women perceive labs differently at the beginning and end of the instruction.

• •

  RQ3: To what extent do students value having agency in open-ended physics lab? During a lab course, different assignments will vary in the amount of agency afforded to students. This provides an opportunity to test how students perceive agency by asking for their preferred assignments and the reasoning for those preferences.

To answer RQ1, we first checked the variance between pre and post scores and found no difference (p = 0.213). Then we performed Students’ $t$-test where we assumed equal variance based on the previous analysis and found that students’ average SoA scores increased from $M$ = 2.96, $SD$ = 0.98 at pre-test to post-test $M$ = 3.73, $SD$ = 0.84 with $t(56)=5.29$, p < 0.001. The mean difference in SoA between pre and post test is 0.77 with 95% Confidence Interval [0.48,1.07] (see Fig 1). The effect size between pre and post SoA scores is 0.76, which is considered as between "medium" and "large" Cohen (1998).

To address RQ2, we compared SoA scores between female and male students at both pre and post-test separately. We did not find any gender difference in students’ SoA either in the pre-test $t$(84) = 0.01, p = 0.99 or the post-test $t$(64) = 0.35, p = 0.72.

When we looked at the distribution of students’ favorite lab, we found that the majority of the students (n = 45) chose the Project Lab unit as their favorite, followed by Lab 3 (n = 30). The word cloud analysis presented in Fig. 2 indicates that students most frequently stated "freedom" as the reason for why they liked any particular lab unit. Based on our coding analysis, as seen in Figure 3, the most common explanation given by students who selected the Project Lab as their favorite unit was the freedom that the lab afforded them. "Interest" was the second most common explanation. The first two lab units were selected by very few students as their favorite lab, 6 and 10 students, respectively. The coding patterns for Lab 1 and Lab 2 were very similar.

How students take up agency and whether they view agency as positive is critical in physics lab courses Dounas-Frazer et al. (2017); Zeiser et al. (2018). We found support that open-ended labs can increase students’ perceptions about their agency. Specifically, addressing RQ1, we examined the relationship between students’ SoA and time, and found that students indicated having more agency (or a greater sense of agency) by the end of the course. In interviews at the end of the semester, many students referred to the notion of freedom explicitly, such as: "There was more freedom for us to choose how to design and carry out an experiment." Given that prior literature has shown students’ attitudes in physics tend to decline as the semester continues Adams et al. (2006), our findings provide evidence that open-ended labs can elevate students’ views towards agency, potentially buffering against these typical declines in motivation.

In order to address RQ2, we also tested whether students’ SoA varied between male and female students. Although previous work suggests that female students experience a larger drop in attitudes than male students in physics courses Kalender et al. (2019b), we found that both female and male students’ sense of agency increased over the semester. Given that male students typically dominate group conversations in physics Heller and Hollabaugh (1992), one possibility that could have happened was that male students could have increased in their SoA more than female students. However, we found that there were no gender differences in SoA scores, both at the start and at the end of the semester. This suggests that open-ended labs with student agency and frequent peer collaboration can help both female and male students’ motivation. We note that this analysis focused on the gender as binary, however, we do acknowledge that gender is a fluid, multi-level, and deeply complex construct.

The design and instruction of these open-ended labs incrementally reduced structure, making room for student agency; instruction built towards the student-guided "Project Lab" unit instead of beginning with it. Thus, we examined students’ reasoning for their preferred lab in addressing RQ3. We found that students most frequently preferred the Project lab unit, suggesting that they embraced self-directed learning (i.e., freedom, see Fig.3). Students’ responses to why they liked Project Lab most often include "freedom" in terms of coming up with their own research question, designing experiments, or being able to be creative in their experimentation. Even though prior work found that students resist against self-guided learning Seidel and Tanner (2013), our results suggest that this might not always be the case and that the particular method of implementing self-guided learning is crucial. Students may have felt positively, rather than frustrated, about the open-endedness because the student agency was expanded in each unit and students were never fully autonomous. Prior work highlights the importance of balancing structure and open-endedness in teaching via gradual increase in student agency Collins et al. (1987). In an interview at the end of the semester, one student described the balance as follows: "I definitely think that it is a good idea to have structure. That being said, I created the structure myself and am able to bend it. Maybe designing our labs has helped. That feels like we had ownership."

Classroom activities with hands-on tasks offer opportunities to teach students to be more agentic in their learning processes. The learning environment and interactions with peers during class can enhance or hinder student agency, which can influence their confidence and identity Godwin et al. (2016). Particularly, first-year college experiences can have important downstream consequences regarding motivation in specific courses and broader academic (e.g., enrolling in more physics classes) and career (e.g., retention in STEM fields) choices Godwin et al. (2016); Hazari et al. (2010). Other research indicates that such agency-enhancing activities facilitate student learning, and the research here indicates that students are likely to perceive that agency positively and without differential impacts by gender.