Share It, Don't Split It - Is It Working?

I'm teaching a physics course with labs over the summer. And if you've taught Summer courses, you know that they go very fast and furious, so I'm not sure if there's any chance for any evaluation on the effectiveness of anything.

I mentioned a study a while back that seems to imply that it is better for students, especially minorities and marginalized students, to share lab work and have equal access to every part of the experiment, rather than splitting responsibilities and have each students just do one part of it. I am still unsure of how effective it is or whether I can tell if it is working, but I've made sure that the students know that no one is to do just one part of the experiment, that everyone must take turns doing different parts of the experiment.

Much to my surprise, the students seem to be amicable about it. So far, I've seen everyone taking turns and rotating themselves to different tasks as they perform the experiment. Better yet, I've seen students helping and teaching other students on what they just learned about doing certain parts of the experiment or in performing the analysis of the data.

One direct result that I've seen so far is that everyone in the group knows how to work and setup the computer interface to connect to the various sensors, whereas in previous classes, I've noticed that the same students had the responsibility of setting up the sensors. Already, I can tell that the students are learning about conducting the whole experiment rather than only certain parts of it.

I did not plan on doing any form of assessment on how beneficial or effective this is, because I had not run any control study before. Besides, it is a summer session, and "rushing" is the most common theme for a physics summer class.

I don't know if this will boost the students' "self-efficacy" but from simply a superficial observation, I can see the benefit of requiring that the lab work be shared rather than split.

Zz.