Introductory Physics II Laboratory — PHYS 1112L
Course Syllabus for Summer 2026
University of North Georgia’s College of Science & Mathematics
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Course Instructor
email: sarah.formica@ung.edu
Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 12:35 – 1:00 PM
Hours: by appointment, book your appointment here.
Office Hours
Booking an Appointment
Respect for Diversity
I recognize that there is a vast untapped intellectual resource in all groups underrepresented in physics. For this reason, I am committed to making physics more accessible to everyone. It is my intent that students from all diverse backgrounds and perspectives be well served by this course, that students’ learning needs be addressed both in and out of class, and that the diversity that students bring to this class be viewed as a resource, strength and benefit. It is my intent to present materials and activities that are respectful of diversity: gender, sexuality, ability, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, and culture. Your suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. Please let me know ways to improve the effectiveness of the course for you personally or for other students or student groups.
Course Catalog Description
Laboratory to accompany PHYS 1112. This course is a laboratory investigation of the fundamental laws of electricity, magnetism, optics, and modern physics. Corequisite: PHYS 1112. (1 credit hour)
Core IMPACTS
This is a Core IMPACTS course that is part of the T (Technology, Mathematics, and Sciences) area. Core IMPACTS refers to the core curriculum, which provides students with essential knowledge in foundational academic areas. This course will help master course content and will support students’ broad academic and career goals.
This course should direct students toward a broad Orienting Question: How do I ask scientific questions or use data, mathematics, or technology to understand the universe?
Completion of this course should enable students to meet the following Learning Outcome: Students will use the scientific method and laboratory procedures or mathematical and computational methods to analyze data, solve problems, and explain natural phenomena.
Course content, activities and exercises in this course should help students develop the following Career-Ready Competencies: Inquiry and Analysis, Problem-Solving, and Teamwork
Learning Goals
This lab is an introduction to experimental science. Rather than following step-by-step instructions to confirm results you already expect, you will learn to design your own experiments, make decisions about how to collect and analyze data, and figure out what your results actually mean — including when they surprise you.
A useful way to frame everything we do in this course is to ask:
How do we know what to trust and what to do?
That question sits behind every decision an experimental scientist makes, from choosing what to measure to deciding what conclusions the data can actually support. By the end of this course, you will be able to approach that question systematically across five areas:
- Design an experiment
- Analyze and evaluate your data
- Interpret your results and extend your investigation
- Communicate your experimental process and findings
- Conduct your experiment collaboratively and ethically
Each of these is described in detail below, including what it looks like to demonstrate that you’ve learned it.
One important expectation to set early: this lab is not designed to reinforce or illustrate concepts from your lecture course. Although the experiments involve physical phenomena you may encounter elsewhere, the focus here is entirely on the practice of experimental science — the skills and habits of mind that let you assess how well any model, concept, or claim holds up against real data.
The goal is not to learn what we know, but to understand how we know it.
Required Texts and Materials
All course materials will be accessed through UNG’s eLearning system, also known as D2L (Desire 2 Learn).
All labs will be completed in person using materials provided in the lab room. You are also welcome to bring in and use additional materials, such as your own smartphone apps or interesting items to investigate.
What You Will Do In and Out of Lab
Lab work happens during your scheduled lab period, supported by short individual homework activities outside of class. Instructions for each unit are posted in D2L — but expect them to be intentionally open-ended. You will have creative freedom to design your own procedures rather than following a script.
You will work in a group of three for the semester. Your lab instructor will be available throughout each session to answer questions, give feedback, and help you think through problems. Other groups in your section are one of your best resources — comparing approaches, talking through unexpected results, and seeing how others tackled the same problem is a normal and valuable part of doing science. Don’t hesitate to reach out to them.
A typical lab session looks like this:
Before lab: Read the instructions for the upcoming unit.
During lab:
- Get familiar with the equipment and the physical system you’re investigating
- Design and conduct an experiment with your group to address the research question
- Reflect on your results as you go and follow up with additional investigations that build on what you find
- Document your work and answer lab manual questions in your lab notes
- Check in regularly with your lab instructor
- Submit your lab notes in D2L before you leave
- Clean up your space and return all equipment
Outside of lab: Complete and submit the homework activity before your next lab meeting unless otherwise noted.
If you can’t make it to lab: Contact your lab instructor as soon as you know — whether that’s in advance or the day of. They will work with you on a plan to complete the lab individually with a negotiated deadline.
Assignments
Homework: On each lab day, you will complete a short homework assignment designed to help you analyze data and reflect on the broader role of experimentation in physics and STEM. These assignments will be submitted through D2L.
Lab notes: Throughout the lab, your group will work together to answer the questions in the in-lab assignment and conduct your investigation. You will submit your group’s answers to the questions, notes about your methods, and data analysis through D2L.
How Groups Will Work Together in Lab
Lab work is a group effort. You will collaborate with your group during every session. Each group member should submit a copy of the group’s lab notes individually in D2L by the end of the period — even though the notes are the same for everyone. This serves as your attendance record for the day.
Keeping track of contributions
Each group member should pick a text color and use it consistently for their contributions to the lab notes throughout the semester. Note which color is yours at the top of your notes. It’s fine if one person does most of the typing in a given week, but the note-taking role should rotate so that everyone takes the lead at some point.
Making sure everyone participates
Every group member should have the opportunity to do all parts of the lab — handling equipment, collecting data, analyzing results, and documenting your process. Here are a few strategies that work well:
Assign and rotate roles. It’s fine to divide responsibilities, but roles should rotate across sessions so everyone gets experience with every part of the work. Regardless of role, everyone should contribute ideas, handle equipment, and participate in decisions.
Share the equipment. Take turns with the setup, or have multiple people managing different parts simultaneously. You might even consider running parallel setups and comparing results — that can itself become part of your investigation.
Keep everyone busy. No one should be sitting idle while they wait for someone else to finish. While one person handles equipment, another can be updating the lab notes, building a spreadsheet, or preparing the next step.
Examples of Roles in Group Work
These roles can help your group divide responsibilities and make sure all aspects of the work get attention. Roles should rotate across sessions. Remember: a role means you are responsible for keeping that area on track — not that you are the only one doing it.
Principal Investigator (PI)
Keeps the group moving and makes sure everyone has a way to contribute. Facilitates discussion when there are disagreements and checks in on overall progress. This is not a leadership or authority role — the PI is not assigning tasks or making final calls, just making sure the group is functioning well and no one is left out.
Reviewer #2
Plays the skeptic. Questions decisions, checks that the group is being rigorous and ethical, and looks for weaknesses in the experimental design or execution. This role intentionally slows things down a little — that’s the point.
Science Communicator
Makes sure the group’s work is being documented clearly enough that someone outside the group could understand it. Oversees what gets written and presented, but is not the only one writing or presenting.
Data Analyst
Keeps the group thinking ahead about analysis. Makes sure the group has considered how they will analyze data before collecting it, and that data is being plotted and examined as it comes in — not just at the end.
Theorist
Connects the experiment to the underlying physics. Considers how theory shapes the experimental design, what limitations the model might have, and what alternative explanations could account for the results.
What Goes in the Lab Notes?
Your lab notes should document your group’s decisions, experiments, data, and analysis as you go — not as a summary at the end. Keeping a good lab notebook is an explicit learning goal in this course, for two reasons:
It reflects real scientific practice.
Scientists and engineers use lab notebooks to record the details of their work as it happens. Good notes let you pick up where you left off, remember why you made a particular decision, or troubleshoot a problem you may have already solved on a previous project. In professional settings, notebook entries are timestamped and pages are never removed — because having a record of what you tried, what went wrong, and how you figured it out is genuinely valuable. Follow the same principle here: never delete or erase anything. If something turns out to be wrong, note that it’s wrong and why — that’s part of the record too.
It saves you time.
Writing things down as you go is faster than reconstructing them later. Think of your lab notes as a running stream of consciousness, not a formal report. They do not need to be in complete sentences. Bullet points are fine. They just need to capture what you did and why at several points throughout the session. Don’t leave it to the end.
(Un)Grading
The grading system used in this course is probably vastly different from that of any other course you have taken. The grading system is actually not grading at all; it is even called ungrading or going gradeless by educators who implement it.
Research has informed us that descriptive feedback, rather than letter grades or scores, leads to higher learning gains and that using grades in an attempt to improve performance is not effective. There is evidence that grades encourage competition over cooperation, suppress creativity, foster a fear of failure, and reduce interest in learning. If you are curious, this review article discusses research related to grades: Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently).
Much of this is confirmed by other researchers like Carol Dweck, whose book Mindset introduced the world to the concept of growth mindset, and Daniel Pink, whose book Drive argued that extrinsic rewards and punishments actually stifle creativity, higher-order thinking, and intrinsic motivation.
It is my hope to engender the dispositions of growth mindset and intrinsic motivation in my students,
so I want to eliminate any practices that work against students developing them.
In this lab, after you turn in work for an assignment, you will receive written and/or verbal feedback about what you did well and what you can do to improve. You will also reflect on your work and your learning goals each week. Throughout the lab course, you will have opportunities to assess your own work, to make improvements in response to feedback, and to elicit and receive new feedback — all of which has been shown to aid students in becoming more engaged and effective learners.
Learning Objectives
These five objectives describe what you will be able to do by the end of this course. Use them to assess your own learning throughout the semester.
Objective 1: Design an experiment
By the end of this course, you can take a research question and turn it into a workable experimental plan. This means deciding what to measure, what to change, and what to keep constant — and making deliberate, justified choices about how to collect data that will actually answer your question.
You can demonstrate this by:
- Identifying the variables in your experiment and explaining the role each one plays
- Choosing equipment and measurement approaches that are appropriate for what you’re trying to find out
- Making a prediction about what you expect to observe before you collect data, and explaining where that prediction comes from
- Planning how much data to collect and at what intervals, with a reason for those choices
- Identifying things that could limit how confident you are in your results — not mistakes, but real physical limitations of your measurement process — and describing how your data collection plan addresses them
Objective 2: Analyze and evaluate your data
By the end of this course, you can take raw data and make sense of it — using appropriate tools and methods to determine what your measurements actually tell you and how much you can trust them.
You can demonstrate this by:
- Using software such as Excel or Python to organize, calculate, and visualize your data
- Identifying sources of uncertainty in your measurements and distinguishing between limitations of your equipment and natural variation in repeated measurements
- Representing uncertainty honestly in your graphs and calculations
- Fitting a model to your data and using the quality of that fit — not just whether it “looks right” — to evaluate how well your data supports a conclusion
- Reflecting on your data as you collect it, rather than waiting until the end, and adjusting your approach if something looks wrong
Objective 3: Interpret your results and extend your investigation
By the end of this course, you can look at what your data showed and decide what it means — including when things don’t go as expected — and use those conclusions to ask better questions or design better experiments.
You can demonstrate this by:
- Drawing conclusions from your analysis and explaining how your data supports or challenges your original prediction
- When results don’t match your expectations, proposing plausible explanations that go beyond “I made a mistake” — such as limitations in your model, equipment, or measurement approach
- Testing whether unexpected results are repeatable before drawing conclusions from them
- When results do match your expectations, pushing further by asking what additional tests or higher-precision measurements might reveal
Objective 4: Communicate your experimental process and findings
By the end of this course, you can clearly explain what you did, what you found, and what it means — in a way that someone else could understand and evaluate.
You can demonstrate this by:
- Keeping a lab notebook that records not just what you did but why you made the choices you made, updated throughout the experiment rather than written after the fact
- Using your notes to inform decisions in future experiments, treating your notebook as a living document rather than a one-time assignment
- Sharing your process and findings with other lab groups, and engaging seriously with their work in return — comparing approaches, discussing differences in results, and learning from how others solved the same problems
- Supporting every conclusion with evidence from your data, and making the connection between your evidence and your claim explicit rather than assumed
Objective 5: Conduct your experiment collaboratively and ethically
By the end of this course, you can work as a productive member of a scientific team — sharing responsibility, contributing ideas, and handling your data with integrity.
You can demonstrate this by:
- Handling unexpected or inconvenient data honestly — neither ignoring results that don’t fit your expectations nor overclaiming results that do, and being transparent about limitations in your conclusions
- Contributing to group decisions by offering ideas and genuinely engaging with your teammates’ ideas, rather than defaulting to one person making all the choices
- Sharing hands-on responsibility with your group, including taking on different roles across experiments rather than always doing the same task
- Giving feedback to peers that is both honest and constructive — identifying what works as well as what could be improved
Final Course Grade
Your final grade in this lab course will be determined based on the skills you learn, the learning goals you achieve, and the competencies that you demonstrate. Throughout the course, you will develop a body of work that will help you to self-assess your learning and make an honest appraisal of your effort and progress in the course.
You will be afforded the agency to evaluate and examine your own learning and suggest your grade in the course.
At the end of the lab course you will propose your final grade in a paper or presentation that provides evidence from your body of work throughout the course for why you believe your suggested grade is fair.
Final Presentation Options
(Choose one)
We can meet via Zoom for a final exit interview during which you will present an organized presentation with evidence to support your proposed final grade. I will provide feedback on your assessment and discuss your grade suggestion with you. Together, we will work toward an agreed upon grade, though I reserve the right to veto a suggested grade. This presentation must be no longer than 20 minutes.
You can prepare and record a 20-minute video presentation with evidence to support your proposed final grade and submit this video presentation to D2L. I reserve the right to veto a suggested grade.
You can propose your final grade in a paper that provides evidence from your body of work throughout the semester for why you believe your suggested grade is fair. This paper has a page limit of 3 pages, single spaced, 12 point font, 1 inch margins. This paper will be submitted to D2L. I reserve the right to veto a suggested grade.
Academic Honesty and Integrity
You are expected to uphold the highest standards of academic honesty and integrity in this course. All work you submit should reflect your own understanding, effort, and voice. Cheating, plagiarism, and any form of misrepresentation — whether through copying others’ work, using unauthorized sources, or misusing AI — undermine both your learning and the integrity of our academic community.
I support the ethical and thoughtful use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools as part of the learning process. When used appropriately, AI can help you brainstorm, clarify concepts, revise writing, or explore new ideas. However, like any tool, its value depends on how it’s used.
If you choose to use AI tools, you are responsible for:
- Ensuring your work reflects your own ideas and comprehension
- Acknowledging any AI assistance (e.g., “I used ChatGPT to help outline my response”)
- Avoiding any use of AI that misrepresents your learning or bypasses the intent of the assignment
Using AI to replace your own thinking or effort — especially on graded work — will be treated as a violation of academic integrity.
If you’re unsure whether a certain use of AI is appropriate, please ask. Ethical use of AI is not just about avoiding dishonesty — it’s about engaging responsibly with powerful tools in ways that support your growth and uphold the values of this academic community.
Note: I used ChatGPT to help draft and revise this policy statement. This is one example of how AI can be used transparently and responsibly in support of meaningful work.
The learning objectives and syllabus language in this document were developed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). I used Claude as a drafting and revision partner: I provided the original objectives, course context, and all content decisions, and Claude helped rewrite them into student-facing language. All final wording was reviewed and approved by me. –Dr. Sarah Formica
Physics Education Research at UNG 