[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Physics lab courses permanently undergo transformations, in recent times especially to adapt to the emergence of new digital technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic in which digital technologies facilitated distance learning. Since these transformations often occur within individual institutions, it is useful to get an overview of these developments by capturing the status quo of digital technologies and the related acquisition of digital competencies in physics lab courses. Thus, we conducted a survey among physics lab instructors ($N=79$) at German, Finnish, and Croatian universities. The findings reveal that lab instructors already use a variety of digital technologies and that the pandemic particularly boosted the use of smartphones and tablets, simulations, and digital tools for communication, collaboration, and organization. The participants generally showed a positive attitude toward using digital technologies in physics lab courses, especially due to their potential for experiments and students’ competence acquisition, motivational effects, and contemporaneity. Acquiring digital competencies is rated as less important than established learning objectives, however, collecting and processing data with digital tools was rated as an important competency that students should acquire. The instructors perceived open forms of labwork and particular digital technologies for specific learning objectives (e.g., microcontrollers for experimental skills) as useful for reaching their learning objectives. Our survey contributes to the reflection of what impact the emergence of digital technologies in our society and the COVID-19 pandemic had on physics lab courses and reveals first indications for the future transformation of hands-on university physics education.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] In recent years, physics instructional labs have been under considerable research and development. However, there seems to be no shared understanding of how the assessment of instructional labs should be arranged to best serve students’ learning and development of expertise. This literature review intends to fill this gap by reviewing the research on classroom assessment of instructional labs from the perspectives of different objectives, purposes, and agents of assessment. The review reveals that classroom assessment in instructional labs has mostly focused on summative assessment, leaving the possibilities of formative assessment understudied. Further, assessment has been conducted mostly by teachers and teaching assistants, and the possibilities for students’ participation in assessment remain unutilized. Two major gaps in the research on instructional labs were identified. The first gap concerns students’ active participation in assessment. Given the active role that students have in the laboratory, their agency in assessment appears to be narrow. The second gap concerns the inclusion of metaskills and perspectives on lifelong learning and work life in assessment. We summarize our findings into a research-based model that assists in the consideration and balancing of different objectives, purposes, and agents in the design of classroom assessment of instructional labs.

Previous studies have proposed that students’ mathematical understanding develops dynamically through the process known as folding back, in which learners revisit earlier forms of understanding and use them to build even deeper levels of mathematical understanding. Digital learning environments, where students can manipulate representations, are often used to enable students to notice properties, patterns, or rules. When working in such an environment, students usually receive support from the environment and the teacher. The interplay between these different sources of support is important according to previous studies. In this study, we examine this interplay in the case of folding back. The study aims to understand how the teacher, together with the learning environment, can support the process of folding back. We collected data from second, fourth, and sixth grade students as they worked in groups to develop a rule for balancing a balance beam in a digital learning environment designed to support folding back. One pre-service teacher guided each three-student group. Data were analyzed by identifying occasions for folding back and characterizing different ways in which the interplay between the teacher and the environment supported students’ folding back. We found different kinds of synergy between the two sources of support. The teachers followed up on and augmented the support from the environment, initiated supplementary folding back, and reinforced the support from the environment. We also found non-synergy between the two sources of support, when the teachers’ support was not aligned with support from the environment.