Assessing first-year undergraduate physics students' laboratory practices: seeking to encourage research behaviours

Encouraging positive inquiry-focused behaviours within the constraints of a physics teaching laboratory environment can be challenging. Here, we report on an implementation, the 'working grade' (w-grade), designed to directly assess aspects of students' laboratory practice with the aim of encouraging first-year undergraduate students to look beyond the concept of a 'correct outcome' to a physics experiment. The w-grade is composed of the five aspects of group work, querying, exploration, attitude and progress which are each marked on a 0, 1, 2, 3 scale. The initial implementation is presented in full as well as a second, simpler variant. The w-grade emphasises and directly rewards inquiry behaviours and students were much more willing to explore the experiments than in previous years