Designing a lab course from the perspective of flow theory

Abstract

Students’ frustration could be a crucial factor preventing successful implementation of inquiry-based learning environments. Here we describe the results of improving students’ attitudes towards open-ended ISLE labs where students design their own experiments. We apply the “flow” framework to analyze students’ responses to the survey concerning their experience during the labs. We describe the revisions of the course based on this analysis that resulted in a significant improvement of students’ attitude toward the labs.