Effects of reducing scaffolding in an undergraduate electronics lab

Design and scientific investigation are recognized as key components of undergraduate physics laboratory curricula. In light of this, many successful lab programs have been developed to train students to develop these abilities, and students in these programs have been shown to exhibit a higher transfer rate of scientific abilities to new situations. This paper describes data from students in an electronics class for physics majors, in which steps were removed from traditional "cookbook" lab guides in order to give students the opportunity to design circuits. Post-lab quizzes were given to investigate how this later affected the students' ability to determine the function of circuits they hadn't seen before. Results are compared with post-lab quiz results from students who were given complete explicit procedures, and no statistically significant difference between the two groups is found. Possible explanations for the null effect and recommended future research directions are provided.