The Quality of Reports in Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Courses and their Relationship with the Level of Scientific Abilities

This thesis aims to provide empirical and theoretical evidence to relate the quality of physics lab reports and the levels of scientific ability of first-year university students. Using an interdisciplinary, multistage mixed-methods design, three perspectives are integrated in seeking to describe the quality of a lab report: (i) a functional perspective on the language in the reports, utilising genre theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics; (ii) an epistemic perspective on modelling practices in physics; and (iii) a measurement perspective for the construction of educational instruments. Firstly, the genre-based, comparative analysis of the construction of theoretical knowledge by experts and students reveals that, even as apprentices in experimental practice, students organise conceptual knowledge in a similar way to an expert in terms of the mandatory stages of the report, but differences are observed in the optional stages deployed by students depending on the physics topic. From the functional linguistic and epistemic perspectives, this study reveals that the laboratory report is structured by means of a complex of genres through which scientific models are constructed with a high dependence on mathematical, visual and verbal modes. Ultimately, the analysis highlights the critical importance of transduction – shifting the representation of phenomena from one mode to another – for model-making. These findings underscore the necessity for students to master transduction as a fundamental multimodal ability for effectively constructing knowledge within laboratory reports. Secondly, using the Construct Modelling approach as a measurement framework, analytical rubrics indicate a progression of levels in multimodal writing quality in integrating semiotic modes to construct models. Finally, through latent regression analysis, the linear relationship between the rubric scores and the scores of an instrument measuring the level of scientific abilities, developed in this thesis, were examined. A weak positive and significant relationship is obtained between the students’ analysis and data visualisation abilities and the quality of the Abstract section of the report. A similar relationship was found between the students’ design experiment ability and the Results and Analysis sections of the lab report. The findings of this thesis contribute to research on the roles of scientific genres, and of multimodality in the construction of knowledge in physics laboratory courses. The thesis underlines the pedagogic importance of explicit attention to the structuring of scientific genres, together with the role of multimodality in developing students’ communication of their meaning-making in physics, and provides empirical evidence to enrich the development of genre-based assessment in a way that contributes to improvement of the assessment of scientific abilities through authentic scientific practices and tasks.

This work © 2024, Dany Lopez.