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Quantitative comparisons to promote inquiry in the introductory physics lab

In a recent report, the American Association of Physics Teachers has developed an updated set of recommendations for curriculum of undergraduate physics labs.1 This document focuses on six major themes: constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, developing technical and practical laboratory skills, analyzing and visualizing data, and communicating physics. These themes all tie together as a set of practical skills in scientific measurement, analysis, and experimentation. In addition to teaching students how to use these skills, it is important for students to know when to use them so that they can use them autonomously. This requires, especially in the case of analytical skills, high-levels of inquiry behaviours to reflect on data and iterate measurements, which students rarely do in lab experiments. In this paper, we describe a simple framework for structuring the critical thinking and inquiry behaviours relevant to lab work, which focuses on iterative cycles of comparisons between data sets. We describe the framework and demonstrate examples of its use in an introductory physics lab course.