A Process for Developing Introductory Science Laboratory Learning Goals To Enhance Student Learning and Instructional Alignment

Abstract

Learning goal (LG) identification can greatly inform curriculum, teaching, and evaluation practices. The complex laboratory course setting, however, presents unique obstacles in developing appropriate LGs. For example, in addition to the large quantity and variety of content supported in the general chemistry laboratory program, the interests of faculty members from various chemistry subdisciplines and the service goals of such a course should be addressed. To optimize the instructional impact of limited laboratory contact time, achieve learning gains in basic and transferable (i.e., valuable in other sciences) laboratory learning content, and establish departmental consensus, a model was created for LG and assessment development that was inspired by interdisciplinary science laboratory LGs implemented at Rice University. These newly developed processes and materials were used to enhance the introductory chemistry laboratory curriculum at the University of British Columbia, involving a large (>1700 student) laboratory program. This model has potential to guide alignment and build consensus within, and possibly across, science laboratory instructional programs.

Upper-level undergraduate chemistry students’ goals for their laboratory coursework

“…To address the first and second research questions, the prevalence of goal statements made by students is displayed in Table . Less than half of the students viewed lab as a place to apply critical thinking skills, integrate information from other coursework, or generate conceptual knowledge, even though these goals all rank high among chemistry faculty members’ stated purposes for laboratory coursework (Bretz, Fay, Bruck, & Towns, ; Bruck & Towns, ; Duis et al, ). Another goal on which students and faculty agreed was the cooperative work between laboratory partners ( n = 11, 65%).…”

“…The interviews were coded using QSR International's NVivo 10 Software (QSR, ). The codes were initially generated from a previously published list of laboratory goals that were generated by science faculty and discipline based education researchers (Duis, Schafer, Nussbaum, & Stewart, ), with additional codes created for unique goals that were introduced by students during the interviews. (A complete list of codes is available as supplementary material accompanying the online article.)…”

Fleiss’s Kappa: Assessing The Concept Of Technology Enabled Active Learning (Teal)

“…The rest of the elements are showing the value of κ approaching the value of 1 which means the assessor reaches the consent of the assessors. The finding showed that the process of developing a practical learning also need technologies to achieve the goals in learning, especially in improving student's hands-on skills such as handle machines, tools or programming software which will enhanced their technical skills (Duis et al, 2013). According to Nikolic (2014), the practical learning also gives students an opportunity to use technologies for gaining experience in scientific tools, results analysis, conducting experiments and find a solution to get actual finding.…”

Organic Chemistry Practice Exam: Helping Students Gain Metacognitive Skills To Excel on the Full-Year ACS Exam

“…The importance of learning from high quality laboratory curriculum (5,30) is also something the authors want to investigate with practice exam data.…”