Characterising the practice of physics as enacted in university student laboratories using ‘Discourse models’ as an analytical tool

This paper explores how university physics students constitute the practice of physics as enacted in student laboratories. In the study thirteen students enrolled in an undergraduate degree programme in physics were interviewed about their experiences of laboratory work. Working from a conceptualisation of learning that draws on situated learning theory, the paper describes the analytical process leading to the construction of two ‘Discourse models’ of physics students as a way of capturing the students’ descriptions of laboratory work. The empirical result is the characterisation of these two Discourse models; a ‘practical physics students’, someone focused on the execution of the experiment, and an ‘analytical physics student’, someone focused on the physics reasoning. The Discourse models are also discussed from a gender perspective