Newly Designed Laboratory Course for Preservice Chemistry Teachers: Do the Students Rate Their Practical Skills As Relevant for Their Future Profession?

Abstract

The laboratory course in organic chemistry for preservice chemistry teachers has been designed anew. For the course, only 2 weeks (8 h a day) are available. Therefore, we wanted to use this time effectively, which led to the following main goals: the students should achieve practical skills, understand the practical procedures they had to conduct, and apply those well-founded to new problems. Besides this, the students should get to know procedures and experiments for their future profession. The design of the course focuses on the concept of "school-related content knowledge" that was applied and adapted for planning this laboratory course. The new course has been evaluated using the results of two questionnaires as well as the content of the reflection tasks that were part of the students' laboratory journals. The students are very content with this newly designed course and are of the opinion that they developed practical skills and that they are able to apply those skills for new experiments. They also rate those skills as useful for their future profession as a chemistry teacher.

Investigation of Laboratory Teaching Strategies in Chemistry Education: Opinions of Pre-service Chemistry Teachers

“…In many researches in the literature, it is emphasized that laboratories are very helpful for learning in terms of supporting conceptual learning of various subjects (Ayas et al, 1994;Hermanns et al, 2022;Hofstein & Lunetta, 1982;Wolf & Fraser, 2008). In the current study, when the purposes of pre-service teachers' use of laboratory strategies were examined, the finding that they would use these strategies mostly to ensure learning is in line with the findings of these studies.…”