Evaluation and intervention of students’ laboratory performance in chemistry graduating classes; Wachemo University, Ethiopia

Abstract

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> The laboratory courses offer students the opportunity to gain manipulative skills, observational skills, and the ability to plan experiments and to interpret experimental data. The laboratory can be an excellent environment for active learning. It has long been considered useful to develop conceptual understanding, but some recent courses have been developed that rely heavily on laboratory experience, in contrast to conventional teaching methods, for the development of conceptual understanding of sciences. The primary purpose of this study was to assess laboratory perceptive of the graduating class students’ of the department of chemistry and to engage them as active learners.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> A total sample containing 20 students consisting of 14 males and 6 females were selected for the study. Four experiments were given to randomly selected participants in the respective strata and students were evaluated on the basis of different parameters. </p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> The findings of this research showed that almost all the sample students fail to correlate their theoretical accumulation with the practical performance.</p><p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> So, severe works should be made on the various issues concerning the laboratory to be a unique learning environment to create well skilled students. </p>

EXAMINING THE EFFECT OF DIRECTED ACTIVITY RELATED TO TEXTS (DARTs) AND GENDER ON STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS IN CHEMISTRY

“…Students taught this way tended to just follow instructions without much thought (White, 1990). In addition, studies have found that students experienced low motivation in the qualitative analysis classrooms because of the demanding nature of the qualitative analysis lessons, whereby students said that they felt 'irritated' with the demanding memory work (Tan, 2005;Tan et al, 2001) and the presence of too much 'noise' (due to the demand of handling many things at once) during the practical session in the laboratory (Gebrehiwot, 2017). Such simultaneous cognitive demands resulted in a loss of interest in the practical task of learning about how to carry out a qualitative analysis.…”