In an idealized General Chemistry Laboratory curriculum, students would hone their experimental design ability with practice encouraged by laboratory exercises designed to be open-ended. However, traditional General Chemistry Laboratory courses often lack opportunities for students to design their own experiments, instead opting to provide students with predetermined protocols. In addition, introducing guided inquiry into a General Chemistry Laboratory is logistically challenging, often prohibiting implementation. Here, we present a method for converting a traditional "cookbook-style" laboratory curriculum into one that is more open-ended with opportunities for students to practice experimental design skills. Our approach involves developing clear learning objectives, evaluating the existing curriculum for alignment to those objectives and providing opportunities for incorporating experimental design, and revising existing protocols. These revisions adopted a two week model, following up a traditional cookbook-style exercise focused on teaching students a given technique with a second week where students designed their own experiments to answer an instructor-provided question situated in a real-world context. This design provided sufficient structure for students to learn basic chemistry laboratory techniques while also creating the opportunity for practicing science process skills such as experimental design. Students in a pilot group experiencing this revised curriculum reported greater increases in their confidence with experimental design than peers in the traditional curriculum. We propose that this model could be adopted by other institutions as a meaningful step toward fully openended laboratory courses while avoiding many of the associated challenges.
Inquiry-based laboratories were implemented into a General Chemistry Laboratory sequence, and the impact of these exercises on students‘ experimental design skills was assessed using a four-part assessment developed for this study. This assessment contained a multiple-choice section, a section asking students to explain their reasoning behind a subset of the multiple-choice answers, an adapted form of the Experimental Design Ability Test, and a section asking about students’ perceptions of themselves. For two years, pretests were administered before the students‘ first lab exercise, and post-tests were administered at the end of the year of General Chemistry Lab for cohorts of students enrolled in a Revised course and cohorts of students in an unchanged (Traditional) course. Overall, students in both the Traditional and Revised curricula experienced gains in learning outcomes as measured by comparing pre- and post-test scores on the first three sections of the assessment. Importantly, these gains were slightly higher for the Revised cohort on the multiple-choice section in Year 2 of the study. The quality of explanations on the second section of the assessment was also higher for the Revised cohort compared to students in the Traditional course. No significant differences were observed in average Experimental Design Ability Test performance. Student perceptions of confidence in their experimental design ability and their ability to conduct experiments were slightly higher for students who had completed the Revised course when compared to the Traditional course. In total, these modest improvements to students’ experimental design abilities reflect a positive trend that supports implementation of inquiry-based laboratory instruction.
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