This paper reviews the ways in which interactions have been studied, and the findings of such studies, in science education in both face-to-face and remote laboratories. Guided by a systematic selection process, 27 directly relevant articles were analysed based on three categories: the instruments used for measuring interactions, the research findings on student interactions, and the theoretical frameworks used in the studies of student interactions. In face-to-face laboratories, instruments for measuring interactions and the characterisation of the nature of interactions were prominent. For remote laboratories, the analysis of direct interactions was found to be lacking. Instead, studies of remote laboratories were mainly concerned with their practical scope. In addition, it is found that only a limited number of theoretical frameworks have been developed and applied in the research design. Existent theories are summarised and possible theoretical frameworks that may be implemented in studies of interactions in undergraduate laboratories are proposed. Finally, future directions for research on the interrelationship between student interactions and laboratory learning are suggested.

Laboratories play a crucial role in the undergraduate science curriculum and the effectiveness of learning in laboratories is influenced by learners’ interactions with other students, the instructors, and the equipment used. In this study, a pre-lab survey was used to collect information about students’ expectations of interactions in chemistry laboratories and how they can be ranked according to their importance. Post-lab surveys were used to capture students’ perspectives about the frequency of interactions that existed in laboratory sessions they had completed. Direct observations of some laboratories were also conducted principally to validate students’ self-reported interactions. The data were also sorted by three levels of student achievement in order to relate students’ expectations of the importance of different interactions (pre-lab survey) and their self-reported frequency of interactions (post-lab survey) with their laboratory grades. Results from the pre-lab survey showed that student–instructor interactions were anticipated to be the most important ahead of conducting the laboratory activity, whereas results from the post-lab surveys showed that the most frequent interactions occurred between students. Students’ self-reports (post-lab survey) and the direct observations agreed well suggesting that the post-lab survey is a robust tool for capturing the frequencies of student interactions in this and future studies. The results also showed that students gaining high grades both anticipated the importance of, and then engaged more frequently in, two-way communications with both students and instructors whereas students with lower grades placed a relatively higher reliance upon passive interactions such as the pre-lab briefing, the laboratory manual and internet sources. Finally, recommendations are offered to curriculum designers, instructors and students based on the overall findings of the study.

This paper describes the development, final design and validation of an instrument that measures a range of student interactions and satisfaction in undergraduate chemistry laboratories. Student surveys or conceptual and attitudinal instruments are widely used techniques for collecting relevant information on student learning.However, there is a lack of specific instruments for collecting data on the relationships between social factors and learning. Consequently, this study attempted to fill this gap by introducing an instrument -the Interactions in Undergraduate Laboratory Classes (IULC). The design of the IULC instrument is based on the theory of distributed cognition, meaning that knowledge is not rooted in an individual's mind, but develops in the process of interacting with the environment. The instrument covers three aspects, (i) Frequency of Interactions, (ii) Satisfaction, and (iii) Importance of Interactions for the specific laboratory. Undergraduate students (N = 204) enrolled in a first-year chemistry course participated in a test case for the instrument and the corresponding data were analysed using different methods for each of the three parts. The factor structure of the data obtained from the first part of the instrument and internal consistency measures are discussed. Among findings captured by the instrument, Student-Teacher (instructors in the university context) Interactions correlated positively with students' satisfaction levels. Implications and suggestions for the use of the instrument are discussed.

A remote laboratory that measures the enthalpy of vaporization (ΔH vap °) and the entropy of vaporization (ΔS vap °) of noctane was designed, constructed, and offered to second-year physical chemistry undergraduates at the University of New England (UNE) and Curtin University. The experiment was delivered in real-time, using equipment controlled remotely via the internet. A survey instrument was developed to investigate the learning process from the students' viewpoint and was followed by focus group interviews. Guidance from the laboratory manual and from the visual hints available through the webcam was important for their learning and was used most frequently among all the interactions. The students were satisfied with the laboratory and would like to perform other remote experiments. Types of learning interactions, such as experiment construction and technical skill learning, could be partly achieved with support from technicians and the meticulous design of online guidance.

Inquiry is one integral part of science learning. Understanding the underlining meaning and the complete procedures of inquiry-based laboratories would be beneficial to student teachers' future work. Therefore, it is necessary for student teachers to perform inquiry-based laboratories and know how to demonstrate them to school students. However, the differences between cookbook-style laboratories and inquiry-based ones may present obstacles for student teachers if most of them were more familiar with the traditional type. This study examined the potential difficulties that student teachers might encounter when conducting inquiry-based chemistry laboratories. Information was gathered through a self-designed questionnaire, interviews, and student teachers' self-reports. Data from the questionnaire were analyzed to gain a preliminary understanding of what challenges the student teachers had met during the inquiry-based laboratory, from their viewpoints. Results from interviews were combined with those from self-reports to investigate how the challenges had impacted the student teachers' perceptions of the difficulty of the inquiry-based laboratory. This study found some challenges encountered by the student teachers in inquiry-based laboratories that were considered difficult, such as presenting research questions. But not all challenges had influences on student teachers' perceptions of the difficulty level of inquiry-based laboratories. A cyclical progression of students' mental states in inquiry-based laboratories is presented to support research about inquiry-based learning.