Mimicking Students’ Behavior during a Titration Experiment: Designing a Digital Student-Centered Experimental Environment

Abstract

More than ever, there is an increasing need for digital experimental learning environments in chemistry. The variety of digital learning approaches provided to students range from simple videos showing experiments to highly interactive virtual laboratories. Regardless of which approach is chosen, a digital learning environment should be adapted to students’ authentic behavior in the laboratory. A special focus should be placed on their experimental skills to ensure that they are adequately prepared for the laboratory. Herein, we report how we designed a student-centered experimental environment on the basis of our observations of students’ authentic behavior and their actions in the laboratory during a titration. Our work is based on three quality factors: individuality, interactivity, and realism. Therefore, the derived digital environment mimics students’ decisions in the laboratory and allows a high degree of student-centeredness. In this article, we describe three aspects of the study: (I) how to convert students’ actions into decision trees, (II) how to set up the titration digitally, and (III) how the targeted cohort of students rated the usability.

Titration digital or analog – Is students′ experimental‐practical understanding be supported equally?

“…Dies ist die erste Titration im Verlauf des Praktikums und somit sind keine praktischen Vorkenntnisse für die Arbeitstechnik der Titration aus den bisherigen Praktikumstagen vorhanden. Näheres zur Entstehung und den spezifischen Merkmalen des interaktiven Videoexperiments wurde bereits publiziert [4].…”

Inter-Twine-d: Combining Organic Chemistry Laboratory and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games

“…To mimic an in-person undergraduate lab experience, Groos et al created video recordings of 16 pairs of volunteer undergraduate students in a titration lab, including discussions between students when performing the experiments. 19 The footage was then compiled and sorted into decision trees of productive (producing the desired outcome) and nonproductive (negatively impacting the expected result) choices. The decision trees and corresponding video clips were collated in a JavaScript library.…”

Design and Evaluation of the BeArS@home and Slugs@home Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Style Online Laboratory Experiments

“…Realism and interactivity are among the key characteristics of effective online experiments . A realistic environment can be created using video-based instruction filmed in a manner that closely reflects what students would have encountered in the physical laboratory.…”

“…Receiving feedback allows students to monitor their progress and determine what they do and do not understand, which can help them self-regulate their learning . Several virtual experiments created during the pandemic include student decision-making as a feature, including a text-based choose-your-own-adventure-style click-through story and photo- or video-based experiments in which students choose different paths that mimic actions students would perform during experiments related to titrations, electrochemistry, or organic reactions …”

“…For this reason, we chose to create online versions of experiments that had already been designed for our student population and used during previous semesters. Though choose-your-own-adventure-style experiments have been reported previously, studies on their use have been limited to individual courses or have focused on only a few different experiments. ,, In contrast, this work covers the design and evaluation of over 70 online experiments created for use in 11 different courses across two universities, spanning a wide range of topics in both general and organic chemistry.…”