Projects in freshman and nonscience oriented laboratory classes

Practical Alternatives to Laboratory in a Basic Chemistry Course Any instructor who has ever supervised a laboratory for rion-chemistry majors and has carefully observed students at work must have often come to conclusions like these: "This is, indeed, an eye-opening experiment for our students. They are learning a lot of things here which they should remember for a long time to come. This should be of tremendous help in their study of chemistry." We had been guided by similar subjective impressions from the past when introducing, in 1971, our Basic Chemistry course and decided,, therefore, to add a laboratory to the 3 hours of lecture per week. While the expectations remained high for a long time, the rising costs of materials and services prompted us soon to question the merits of a laboratory. This paper describes an attempt to evaluate moTe objectively the contribution of laboratory experience on the student achievement in an elementary, oneterm chemistry course and suggests some less expensive alternatives.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical alternatives to laboratory in a basic chemistry course

Dubravcic¹

1979

“…Finally, Walter (53) believed most beginning students lacked the skill needed to be truly independent. Several colleges (54,55) tried to offset these problems by teaching techniques using a structured format for the first few weeks and then introducing flexible projects. Other strategies reported include open lab times (44,46,56), minilabs (46, 57), and interdisciplinary projects (58)(59)(60)(61).…”

Section: Training Chemical Science Practitionersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 20th century general chemistry laboratory: Its various faces

Lloyd¹

1992

“…tionship or coherence. This procedure gives the student little encouragement to work toward a better understanding of chemistry, and in many cases, the experiments are far from the situations faced by chemists in their daily work. A better approach, which stimulates the creativity and logical thinking of the student, involves project-like experi ments (.2), (3). The projects are made up by a sequence of related experiments which are rich in concepts and allow the students to get acquainted with techniques used in chemical research (4).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A transition from a traditional to a project-like physical chemistry laboratory via heterogeneous catalysis study

Goldwasser¹,

Leal²

1979

A Transition from a Traditional to a Project-Like Physical Chemistry Laboratory via a Heterogeneous Catalysis Study A new approach to the teaching of a physical chemistry laboratory is presented which combines traditional and project-like experiments.Generally, to the student, the educational objectives of a chemistry laboratory are not well defined. The physical chemistry laboratory is no exception especially when a cookbook-type scheme is followed (I). With such a scheme, isolated experiments are carried out and fail to show an overall rela-