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Unfinished Recipes: Structuring Upper-Division Laboratory Work To Scaffold Experimental Design Skills

Experimental design is a desirable outcome of laboratory education. Incorporating inquiry into the laboratory curriculum is attractive, but there are acknowledged concerns from practical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, and these are accentuated in upper-division courses. In this work...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of chemical education 2019-01, Vol.96 (1), p.53-59
Main Authors: Seery, Michael K, Jones, Ariana B, Kew, Will, Mein, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Experimental design is a desirable outcome of laboratory education. Incorporating inquiry into the laboratory curriculum is attractive, but there are acknowledged concerns from practical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, and these are accentuated in upper-division courses. In this work, we draw on the extensive literature relating to experimental design and inquiry learning to conceive a pragmatic laboratory curriculum that invokes the development of experimental design skills in a structured way. The model also incorporates the core principles of formative assessment, so that students get a chance to improve their work on the basis of feedback as they are doing it. We illustrate this model with two examples from our own practice of upper-division physical chemistry, but the basis of the design is elaborated so that interested readers can adopt it for any aspect of practical chemistry where there is a desire to incorporate experimental design skills.
ISSN:0021-9584
1938-1328
DOI:10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00511