  Design and scientific investigation are recognized as key components of
undergraduate physics laboratory curricula. In light of this, many successful
lab programs have been developed to train students to develop these abilities,
and students in these programs have been shown to exhibit a higher transfer
rate of scientific abilities to new situations. In this paper, I use data from
an electronics class for physics majors to investigate how giving students the
opportunity to design circuits --- by removing steps from traditional cookbook
lab guides --- affects the students' ability to determine the function of
circuits they haven't seen before. I compared post-lab quiz results from
students who were given explicit procedures to those of students who were given
incomplete procedures, and I found no statistically significant difference in
the results of the two groups. I explore possible explanations for the null
effect and recommend future research directions.

Physics Education