Instructor interactions in traditional and non-traditional labs

As physics laboratory courses (labs) transition from traditional, model-verifying to reformed, discovery-based investigations, it becomes crucial to understand the role of the instructor within various lab types. In this talk, I describe a new approach to examining student-instructor interactions using tools from social network analysis, which we used to efficiently compare interactions of five different lab sections belonging to three different lab courses. We find that reformed labs have higher levels of student-instructor interaction compared to traditional labs. Furthermore, the duration of student-instructor interactions between labs of the same type is comparable despite different instructors and students, suggesting the level of interaction within a lab session is more dependent on the structure of the lab rather than an instructor's implementation of the pedagogy. This work is a preliminary step toward understanding the extent to which student-instructor interactions support the improved outcomes observed in reformed, discovery-based labs compared with traditional labs.