  A thoughtful approach to designing and improving labs, particularly at the
advanced level, is critical for the effective preparation of physics majors for
professional work in industry or graduate school. With that in mind, physics
education researchers in partnership with the physics faculty at the University
of Colorado Boulder have overhauled the senior-level Advanced Physics Lab
course. The transformation followed a three part process of establishing
learning goals, designing curricula that align with the goals, and assessment.
Similar efforts have been carried out in physics lecture courses at the
University of Colorado Boulder, but this is the first systematic research-based
revision of one of our laboratory courses. The outcomes of this effort include
a set of learning goals, a suite of new lab-skill activities and transformed
optics labs, and a set of assessments specifically tailored for a laboratory
environment. While the particular selection of advanced lab experiments varies
widely between institutions, the overall transformation process, the learning
goals, and the assessments are broadly applicable to the instructional lab
community.
