To date, few general chemistry laboratory studies have included affective measures despite calls for more research on aspects of this domain. This shortage of studies may be partially due to the scarcity of affective measures that have been designed for, or tested in, the college laboratory setting. To provide measures for use in this environment, several existing affective scales were adapted for this new context. Before data from the scales were utilized to study the environment, evidence was provided for the validity and reliability of the data generated from them. Once sufficient evidence was provided, it was possible to determine affective differences between students completing a Beer’s law experiment in the traditional hands-on laboratory (control group) and a similar experiment in a virtual environment (treatment group). To assess expected differences between environments, scales for anxiety, emotional satisfaction, intellectual accessibility, usefulness of lab, equipment usability, and open-endedness of lab were selected. To account for potential between-student differences, scales for feeling-related initial interest and value-related initial interest were selected. Overall, students who completed the virtual experiment scored significantly lower on the emotional satisfaction, intellectual accessibility, usefulness of lab, and equipment usability scales. However, it was noted that student responses in the virtual environment varied significantly by which teaching assistant (TA) instructed the section. To test for a possible instructor effect, data from the virtual sections were grouped by TA as “Virtual Group A” and “Virtual Group B”. Group A contained the TAs who had sections with lower averages on the emotional satisfaction scale as compared to group B. After controlling for instructor, differences between student responses in the “Hands-On” sections and “Virtual Group A” sections were no longer significant while significant differences remained between the responses in the “Hands-On” and “Virtual Group B” sections. This outcome indicated that the TA instructing the course may have been more influential on students’ affective outcomes than the environment in which the experiment was performed.

To date, the efficacy of virtual experiments is not well-understood. To better understand what differences may exist between a hands-on learning environment and a virtual learning environment, three experiments were chosen for investigation. For each experiment, approximately half of the students completed a hands-on version of the experiment, and the other half completed a virtual version. After completing the given experiment, students were compared on the following: their ability to meet the learning objectives for that experiment, their responses to six affective scales, and their grade on a laboratory report. Differences were found for four learning objectives. Two of these learning objectives were on the Beer’s law experiment and the other two were on the titration experiment whereas the calorimetry experiment had no differences between groups on learning objectives. However, all four differences are likely due to differences in procedures between environments and not due to the environment itself. Additionally, differences were found on two of the affective scales (usefulness of lab and equipment usability) across all three experiments indicating that the students who completed a virtual experiment found the experiment to be less useful and the virtual environment harder to use. Students that completed the virtual version of the titration experiment also reported that the experiment took less time as indicated by the difference in the open-endedness of the lab scale. These differences are not representative of a students’ individual experience, however. To capture individual experiences, latent profile analysis was conducted to determine what affective profiles existed within the population. There were three common profiles identified across the three experiments: low affective outcomes, medium affective outcomes, and high affective outcomes. These indicate that while a majority of the students have medium or high affective outcomes and do well on laboratory reports, there are anywhere from 4% to 17% of the students completing a given experiment that have low affective outcomes but still do equally well on the laboratory report as compared to the other students. Future work should be conducted to assess why students report low affective outcomes and if a different type of laboratory learning environment or curriculum type would better serve them.

Quasi-experiments are common in studies that estimate the effect of instructional interventions on student performance outcomes. In this type of research, the nature of the experimental design, the choice in assessment, the selection of comparison groups, and the statistical methods used to analyze the comparison data dictate the validity of causal inferences. Therefore, gathering and reporting validity evidence in causal studies is of utmost importance, especially when conclusions have real policy implications for students and faculty, among other stakeholders. This review examines 24 articles that reported quantitative investigations of the effect of instructional interventions on performance-based outcomes conducted within undergraduate chemistry courses. Specifically, we examined four aspects of conducting such evaluations, including: (1) the type of quasi-experimental design used to study the relationship between interventions, students, outcomes, and settings; (2) the metrics used to measure performance outcomes; (3) the type of groups used to contrast outcomes across experimental conditions; and (4) the statistical methods used to analyze the comparison data. Through the examination of these four aspects of causal studies, together with a validity typology for quasi-experimental designs, we catalogued the metrics and methods used to compare student performance outcomes across varied instructional contexts. Recommendations for researchers and practitioners planning quasi-experimental investigations and for interpreting results from causal studies in chemistry education are provided.

Fluorescence spectroscopy experiments are a frequently taught as part of upper-division teaching laboratories. To expose undergraduate students to an applied fluorescence technique, a corrosion detection method, using quenching, was adapted from authentic research for an instrumental analysis laboratory. In the experiment, students acquire fluorescence spectra of sensing molecules in the presence of mock sculpture samples and discuss the condition of the sculptures based on the levels of soluble iron detected. This real-world-based experiment allows students the chance to engage with ongoing research and further understand the challenges with early detection of corrosion. Most students successfully completed the experiment, wrote a journal-quality report, and met the learning outcomes.

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