Implementing the Science Writing Heuristic in the Chemistry Laboratory

摘要

Over the past twenty years,educational research studies have shown that if a traditional laboratory report format is used with traditional verification activities,students may learn laboratory techniques,but they learn little else (1-3).To address this problem,inquiry and collaborative learning have been used as instructional strategies in college introductory chemistry laboratory (4-7)and organic chemistry (8-11)courses.In a guided-inquiry format,students are not told explicitly how to do the experiment; they are required to be more active in designing the experiment than with a traditional format.Students who use inquiry procedures are more likely to understand what they have done and why they have done it because they have proposed a hypothesis,designed an experiment to test this hypothesis,collected data,observed trends,and made connections between observations and principles (12-14).Guided-inquiry experiences help students think about the ideas underlying laboratory work,construct concepts to answer open ended-questions,and engage in independent thought (15-20).