Helping Students to “Do Science”: Characterizing Scientific Practices in General Chemistry Laboratory Curricula

Abstract

Over the past 20 years research on reform efforts aimed at the chemistry laboratory has focused on different aspects of students’ experiences including increasing content knowledge, improving student attitudes toward chemistry, incorporating inquiry activities, and providing students a hands-on experience related to the chemistry concepts learned in lecture. While many of these efforts have been designed to incorporate inquiry activities, because this term is somewhat nebulous, it can be difficult to identify which aspects of the laboratory support inquiry. The Scientific and Engineering Practices outlined in the Framework for K–12 Science Education provide a new way to identify and characterize laboratory activities more precisely. This work compares two laboratory curricula in terms of the extent to which the curricula as a whole provide opportunities for students to engage in scientific practices and characterizes in which sections of a laboratory activity (prelab/procedure, data manipulation/analysis, conclusions/report out) students most frequently engage specific scientific practices. Further, this study demonstrates how a modified version of a published protocol for evaluating incorporation of science practices into assessment items (the 3-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol) can be used to evaluate laboratory activities in a systematic way. Ways in which such an analysis can inform and support the revision of laboratory curricula are also discussed.

FUNdamental Developments in the Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Laboratory

“…Though different strategies can be taken toward improving the traditional lab teaching format, studio-based and problem-based approaches discussed in this section of the paper have been shown to be very effective (Collison, Cody, Smith, & Swartzenberg, 2015). Some educational researchers advocate a complete re-evaluation of organic chemistry lab teaching (Carmel et al, 2019). Regardless of the extent of proposed instructional change, all these scholars agree that the traditional "cookbook" chemistry lab format is ineffective for teaching the new wave of organic chemists y.…”

“…Further, the students have described the chemistry lab experience to be an "(The lab is an) isolating and ineffective use of learning time and (we) fail to see how the experiment is relevant (to the course)" Reid & Shah, 2007, p.2 This statement also depicts that there is a lack of perceived relevance from the student perspectives, which in turn affects their overall motivation for the overall lab. However, these problems can be circumvented by the instructors providing clear learning objectives and modifying the lab evaluation and report structure by incorporating a wide range of activities to help the students, which in the end can develop better chemists (Carmel et al, 2019).…”

Measuring institutional transformation: a multifaceted assessment of a new faculty development program

“…However, TSPK is fundamentally different from PCK in that "TSPK is canonical, generated by research or best practice, and can have a normative function in terms of what we want teachers to know about a topic-and context-specific instruction" (Gess-Newsome, 2015, p. 33). In higher (Brookfield and Preskill, 2012;National Research Council, 2012;Lund and Stains, 2015;Nilson, 2016;Sternglass, 2017;Sunal et al, 2014), knowledge about student misconceptions and conceptual change strategies (Brown et al, 2018;McConnell et al, 2006), and knowledge of scientific and engineering practices (Carmel et al, 2019;National Research Council, 2012) and reflective and contemplative practice (Boud et al, 2013;Gunnlaugson et al, 2014) form the basis for TSPK.…”

Reasoning, granularity, and comparisons in students’ arguments on two organic chemistry items

“…Additionally, an ACS Exam for organic chemistry did not assess students' ability to construct scientific explanations or arguments at all (Stowe and Cooper, 2017). To better support student development of argumentation and explanation skills, curricula have emerged that explicitly include argumentation and explanation (Talanquer and Pollard, 2010;Cooper and Klymkowsky, 2013), as well as research focused on characterizing argumentation and explanation in laboratory settings (Carmel et al, 2019).…”