===== About Upper-Division ``Labs'' =====

Most students enter upper-division courses with lots of experience with course-based ``labs.''  They may well come into your course with epistemological expectations of ``labs'' that are in conflict with the classroom norms you wish to establish.  Specifically, students may well think that labs are a time when they are expected to come into class, take data according to a particular template, and go home to analyze their data and write-up a lab report.  Of course, sometimes this may be exactly what you want them to do.  But, when this is \textbf{not} what you want, particularly if you want small groups to spend considerable time \textbf{in-class} analyzing what they have done, we have found that there is considerable advantage to not calling the experience a ``lab,'' but rather to call it a small-group activity.

Therefore, we have attempted in this wiki, to write up most classroom experiences as ``small group activities,'' unless the ``lab'' epistemology is explicitly called for.  There are, however, many cases where your academic scheduling constraints may force you into a lab-mode.  In this case, you may find it advantageous to combine several small-group activities into a single ``lab.''  You can find below a list of such groupings that we have occasionally found useful.