How Laboratory Activities Affect Motivation : A Study of Student Motivation in the Physics Laboratory

Abstract: Laboratory work and student motivation are two lead roles in physics education. Laboratory work provides a strategy to help students conceptualise about physical phenomena while student motivation is a more general but no less crucial part of all education and education research. Cognitive processes alone can not entirely explain how students understand things. Due to both these parts' importance in physics education it is important to not only examine them separately but to examine the relationship between the two, which prompts the purpose of this project. This project aims to examine the effect of laboratory work on student motivation. 15 university students' perspectives on this were qualitatively explored through semi-structured interviews. The participants were restricted to students at Uppsala University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology who had chosen a bachelor's, teacher's, or master's programme in physics or engineering. The interviews were transcribed, translated, and analysed. The theoretical framework for this project was attribution theory and the methodological framework was phenomenography. Through the analysis six categories of how laboratory work affects motivation emerged; inquiry, lab partner, teacher, use of time, structure, level of difficulty, and interest. From this, ten major conclusions were drawn; verifying the theory can be motivating, a higher level of inquiry is more motivating, external causes perceived as controllable decreases motivation, lab assistants may increase motivation, the time pressure may be unmotivating, attributing success to structure is motivating, the low level of difficulty is unmotivating, individual interest in physics is motivating, and a high level of inquiry could stimulate situational interest which in time may increase motivation. This provides an overview of how laboratory work affects motivation, partially explaining the relationship between these two lead roles.