Undergraduate physics laboratory instruction in the US is in disarray: Equipment is dilapidated, experiments are not up to date, many schools don’t offer labs beyond the first year, faculty get scant credit for investing time in the labs, and funding for maintaining and updating labs is lacking. “There is a problem, there really is, at every level,” says Randolph Peterson, a physicist at Sewanee University in Tennessee.
A host of intertwined efforts are emerging to combat the problems facing undergraduate laboratory teaching. Those efforts include conferences, training sessions, and other activities organized by the Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA), a decade-old professional organization of which Peterson is president. Two years ago physicist Jonathan Reichert created a foundation to promote and support undergraduate physics laboratory instruction. TeachSpin, the company he started more than two decades ago, now belongs to the foundation and continues to create and disseminate new experiments for advanced lab instruction.
The latest thing to hit the streets is TeachSpin’s 44-foot trailer, dubbed the Food Truck for the Physics Mind. It debuted in January, with a mission of hauling a suite of hands-on experiments for one- and two-day visits to physics departments around the country.
Tight funding, low status
Among the roughly 750 institutions in the US that offer a physics bachelor’s degree, “there has been a collapse” in lab courses in recent decades, says Illinois Wesleyan University’s Gabriel Spalding, an ALPhA board member and vice president of the Reichert Foundation. The traditional physics curriculum is made up of labs, lectures, and computational work, he says. At ALPhA, “we are trying to promote covaluing the hands-on labs.” In terms of laboratory equipment, poor institutions are more challenged, he notes, but adds that “it’s surprising how little some top-ranked institutions are doing.”
One reason that laboratory instruction is suffering is that money for updating equipment has shrunk and become harder to obtain. In 1985 NSF established the Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (ILI) program, which made matching grants available for lab equipment in many fields of science. In its first decade, according to NSF program records, ILI awards were made to 1185 institutions in amounts from $5000 to $100 000 and totaling $158.6 million.
Enrique Galvez (center) regularly mentors other physics instructors on how to set up and run the quantum optics experiment he developed. Greg Severn (left) of the University of San Diego and Joshua Grossman of St Mary’s College of Maryland attended an immersion workshop in August 2012 organized by the Advanced Laboratory Physics Association.
Enrique Galvez (center) regularly mentors other physics instructors on how to set up and run the quantum optics experiment he developed. Greg Severn (left) of the University of San Diego and Joshua Grossman of St Mary’s College of Maryland attended an immersion workshop in August 2012 organized by the Advanced Laboratory Physics Association.
Over the years the ILI program has been transformed and repackaged several times. “Initiatives that once focused largely on equipment have adopted broader educational missions,” says NSF spokesperson Robert Margetta. Tracing the funding level through those incarnations is nearly impossible, he says, but it’s definitely less than was available in earlier years. Moreover, the directions for the current program require applicants to “be clear about the knowledge generating aspects of their proposal.”
That’s an unreasonable barrier, says Peterson. “If I want money for equipment, I don’t want to do physics education research [PER]. And if someone else wants to do PER, they don’t want to approach developing an experimental lab the way I go about it.” He notes that departments typically allocate about $1000 a year for laboratory equipment and supplies. Sometimes scientists can get money for laboratory experiments by including them as outreach in a proposal for research money. But, says Spalding, “there really is no significant federal money for instructional lab equipment anymore.”
In July 2015 some 365 physicists, including many of ALPhA’s roughly 250 members, signed a petition calling on NSF to “immediately begin focused discussion of ways to re-energize its commitment to instructional laboratory education for a next generation of students who must be more adequately prepared to address the nation’s STEM [science, technology, engineering, and medicine] needs.” Spalding sent the petition to NSF again on 28 February of this year. Two days later acting chief operating officer Joan Ferrini-Mundy responded that undergraduate education of the next generation of STEM students “is of very high priority to the NSF… . I look forward to ongoing opportunities to work together.”
At many institutions, students are still doing the Millikan oil-drop experiment, the Cavendish gravitational force experiment, and other decades- or even centuries-old experiments. “We see stagnation in what is offered,” says Lowell McCann of the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. With so many advances in both scientific understanding and technologies, “we need new ideas to flow into this part of the curriculum,” he says.
Financial stress is not the only hindrance. Maintaining labs takes time and requires knowledge beyond any one person’s research expertise. “It’s hard work to maintain a piece of equipment inherited from a previous faculty member, and even more challenging to create a new lab experiment,” says Colgate University’s Enrique Galvez.
Typically one to two faculty members in a given department take on the job of maintaining labs. “The instructors like what they do and are committed,” Galvez says. But it’s hard to attract young faculty to instructional labs, partly because maintaining them doesn’t go far toward winning tenure.
Two new prizes are intended to boost recognition for undergraduate lab instruction. The $5000 Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award of the American Physical Society (APS) goes to faculty who have developed and sustained an outstanding advanced laboratory instruction program. A TeachSpin-funded $4000 award, which ALPhA and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) will bestow for the first time this summer, recognizes undergraduate physics students for developing an advanced laboratory apparatus.
Grassroots dedication
To promote communication among laboratory instructors, AAPT in 2006 started an electronic mailing list to foster discussion and interaction. Then, in 2009, ALPhA, which has ties to both AAPT and APS, held the first of what has become a triennial Beyond the First Year (BFY) of College laboratory conference to showcase lab experiments.
The most recent BFY conference, in July 2015 at the University of Maryland in College Park, took over every available corner of instructional lab space for 60 workshops, says Spalding. “People brought lasers, radioactive sources, and so on. It’s a smorgasbord for faculty and staff to see what they may want to teach.”
Loaded with 17 hands-on experiments, this truck began making the rounds of US physics departments in January.
Loaded with 17 hands-on experiments, this truck began making the rounds of US physics departments in January.
The BFY experience, which gives attendees brief exposure to many experiments, led ALPhA to launch two-and-a-half-day workshops to train instructors on a particular experiment. The first dozen “immersions” took place in 2010. In 2016 some 27 immersions were held around the country on topics such as multiphoton microscopy with a compact fiber laser, plasma-physics spectroscopy, and galactic rotation as evidence for dark matter. The immersions to date have attracted a total of 385 participants, says McCann, who coordinates the workshops. Participants come away with a list of parts, including vendors and prices, to get them started back at their home campus. Attending an immersion costs $350 plus lodging. An NSF grant to ALPhA helps with costs and fully covers participants from minority-serving institutions.
About five years ago Carl Grossman, a Swarthmore College physicist who is the driver and host of the TeachSpin physics food truck, participated in an immersion on quantum optics and “walked away having doubled my knowledge about Bell’s inequality.” There were a half dozen participants, he recalls, and “we had everything from people like me who had already built experiments in the topic but still had trouble to others who hadn’t done anything.” More recently he led an immersion on experiments that investigate noise. In an experiment with Johnson noise, Boltzmann’s constant is extracted from thermal fluctuations across a resistor, and in one using Schott noise, the electron charge is deduced from fluctuations in the current from a lamp.
Inside the truck. Students from a mathematical methods class at the State University of New York at Fredonia visited the Food Truck for the Physics Mind this past February.
Inside the truck. Students from a mathematical methods class at the State University of New York at Fredonia visited the Food Truck for the Physics Mind this past February.
A survey of participants from 2010–14 showed that 18 months after their immersion, 60% of respondents—43% of the participants—had already introduced the experiment back home. “We are happy that a large number are able to go and implement,” says McCann.
Experiments for undergraduate labs can run from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. ALPhA offers a range of immersions, says McCann, from ones on experiments that use Arduinos, programmable devices that cost tens of dollars, to one using x-ray diffraction, for which the equipment can cost up to about $25 000. The most popular immersion has been a quantum optics experiment with single photons that Galvez and colleagues developed, which from scratch costs around $18 000.
To make it easier for campuses to afford the photon optics experiment, ALPhA arranged with Excelitas Technologies to provide an education-grade version of its commercial photon detector at a deep discount. With money borrowed from AAPT, ALPhA buys the detectors in bulk and then sells to schools at cost plus shipping. So far, the organization has delivered more than 400 detectors to around 100 institutions.
In more of a one-off, ALPhA found homes in undergraduate laboratories for 40 new vacuum pumps donated by Kimball Physics Inc. “We posted on our webpage, and it took us 30 minutes to give them away,” says Peterson.
“I got the bug”
Reichert, whose fingerprints show up on many of the efforts to bolster undergraduate labs, became a player more than two decades ago when he noticed that “more and more advanced labs were disappearing.” Now 85 years old, he remembers how he and his peers would “take old research equipment and make experiments” for undergraduates. That was standard, he says, “but faculty today know less and less about building instruments. They are not going to take a lock-in amplifier and spend a week trying to get it to work.”
During a sabbatical year in 1992, he and two former students designed a tabletop pulsed NMR apparatus for undergraduates. In 1994 they sold the first one to Carnegie Mellon University, where, says Reichert, the original instrument is still in regular use. “I got the bug,” he says. A few years later he left his faculty position at the University at Buffalo and founded TeachSpin. “We build instruments to optimize thinking, experimental skills, analysis of data, and so forth,” he says.
As an example, he describes how he and others at TeachSpin used interferometry to measure the tiny change in the length of a nickel rod caused by an applied magnetic field. “We noticed the fringe pattern was drifting like crazy,” he says. “We figured out that it was a combination of thermal expansion and magnetostriction. For research, you would thermally isolate the sample, but for teaching, we left it so students could figure out for themselves what was going on.”
TeachSpin now markets more than a dozen advanced undergraduate experiments. But, says Reichert, profit is not the aim—“last year we netted $3500,” which in any case was plowed back into the parent foundation. Rather, it works to build up instructional laboratories. Starting two years ago, the foundation began awarding equipment grants to laboratory instructors who had attended an ALPhA immersion workshop. The foundation puts in 40% of an apparatus’s cost, up to a maximum of $7500. So far, it’s paid out more than $100 000.
The aim of the Food Truck for the Physics Mind is to excite students and faculty. The truck is equipped with 17 undergraduate experiments, currently all TeachSpin inventory. Up to a dozen people at a time can come in and try out the equipment. “We are hoping to hit two or three schools a week,” Grossman says.
The big picture is that “we want to bring back the advanced lab,” says Reichert. It’s a “central part of undergraduate education, and we will support it in every way we can.”
