A part of 2.2: Lightning Talk session.

Physical Sciences Research Experience – a model for co-designing lab experiences with students, for students
Kris Kim, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Physical & Environmental Sciences, UTSC
Effie Sauer, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Physical & Environmental Sciences, UTSC
Lana Mikhaylichenko, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Physical & Environmental Sciences, UTSC

Laboratory courses have traditionally served as opportunities to support students’ development across a wide range of skills, while also offering spaces to be creative, for both students and faculty alike. While creating new laboratory exercises can be exciting and rewarding, offering new experiments regularly can be quite challenging as the process can be time and resource intensive. One of the latest initiatives offered at the University of Toronto’s (Scarborough campus) Department of Physical & Environmental Sciences is a second-year research course (PSCB90) that provides students with an opportunity to experience self-directed research early on in their programs of study. This course is an elective to our students and projects are made available every term based on faculty needs and availability. Since its first offering (Summer 2019), projects focused on designing new laboratory experiments have been popular, especially in recent months with the sudden shift to online teaching and learning. Not only have these projects allowed for more regular renewal of laboratory curriculum, but it has offered a unique opportunity to naturally bring in student voices and ideas into the curriculum, while also training them to become independent researchers. In this presentation, we will describe the impact of this initiative on students, faculty, and program curricula, and share examples of projects focused on co-creating new lab experiments with students for both in-person and online delivery.