It was planned to introduce online pre-laboratory session activities to a first-year undergraduate
physics laboratory course to encourage a minimum level of student preparation for experiments
outside the laboratory environment. A group of 16 and 17 year old laboratory work-experience
students were tasked to define and design a pre-laboratory activity based on experiments that they
had been undertaking. This informed the structure, content and aims of the activities introduced to
a first year physics undergraduate laboratory course, with the particular focus on practising the
data handling. An implementation study showed how students could try to optimise high grades, rather
than gain efficiency-enhancing experience if careful controls were not put in place by assessors.
However, the work demonstrated that pre-university and first-year physics students can take an
active role in developing scaffolding activities that can help to improve the performance of those
that follow their…