Spotlight on Teaching: Bickel's Hands-On Advances Students' Research Skills

Janis Leibold
July 1, 2000


Posted in LQP OnLine Spring 1997

Professor William Bickel's experimental physics laboratory courses help undergraduates learn the basic experimental skills they will need to engage in research and technology. Bickel's students use both state-of-the-art and "WWII surplus" equipment to demonstrate basic phenomena, applications and techniques while solving specific research problems.

Bickel's students begin their research experience by using simple tools such as lenses, transducers and lasers to solve problems in a variety of domains: psychology, evolutionary biology, color vision and music, to name just a few. By using these simple tools, students become familiar with the fundamental concepts of physics.

At the same time, Bickel helps the students see how these simple tools have been integrated into more complex measurement devices like microscopes, telescopes, and atomic accelerators.

Bickel starts by giving students a basic apparatus. Students must then discover the device's function and invent a way to collect experimental data with the device. Like true experimenters, Bickel's students learn to fail and succeed by asking their own questions then looking for the answers in the data they obtain.

Bickel introduces his students to a broad range of resources - from trade magazines, technical reports, ads, texts, and published papers to experts in various fields. Sometimes experts visit the class and give lectures or demonstrations. At other times Bickel's classes may visit the experts' own labs.

Each student chooses a particular research problem, which may or may not be related to Bickel's research in atomic physics. The only requirements Bickel sets are that the project must be theoretically and technically sound, that it must lead to a quantitative measurement that can be measured with statistics and that it must be completed during the one-semester course. When several students are interested in a common problem, they may choose to work together as a group. Sometimes Bickel assigns joint projects to build cooperation, competition and efficiency among students. Each research problem requires the student to set up and calibrate lab equipment, then collect and analyze the data they obtain. Students present their final research reports to the class. Frequently, these reports become the basis for a paper that will be published or presented by the student to a larger audience beyond the UA.

Bickel summarizes his teaching philosophy this way: To learn to do science, students need to move from reading about the experiments of others to designing real experiments in which they take real-world measurements using real measurement devices. Students discover that designing research proposals are easy, but designing experimental setups that will produce the quality data needed to finish the project is not.

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