  While lab courses are an integral part of studying physics aiming at a huge
variety of learning objectives, research has shown that typical lab courses do
not reach all the desired goals. While diverse approaches by lab instructors
and researchers try to increase the effectiveness of lab courses, experimental
tasks remain the core of any lab course. To keep an overview of these
developments and to give instructors (and researchers) a guideline for their
own professional efforts at hand, we introduce a research-informed framework
for designing experimental tasks in contemporary physics lab courses. In
addition, we demonstrate within the scope of the EU-co-funded
DigiPhysLab-project how the framework can be used to characterize existing or
develop new high-quality experimental tasks for physics lab courses.
