Geometry and laboratory students

Students in General Physics laboratories have a particular way of plotting graphs, evaluating variables, using equations, and so forth, which pretends to show what they learned in their math courses. That is evident in drawings and analyses that show an unusual treatment of experimental data. Interviews with the students concerned confirmed a lack of physical interpretations of the data to be plotted, as well as non existent connections between the objective of the experiment and the graph of the data. Some of them expected to follow an algebraic procedure to get an acceptable and “mathematically correct” solution. The students’ responses to a brief test on the uses of graphs showed that the emphasis on graph plotting in engineering courses is far below the needs of engineering practice in research labs or industry.