Authentic laboratory experiences and students' development of scientific process skills

CHED 1547

Kellie F Green, kfgreen@purdue.edu, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Purdue University, 560 Oval Drive, Box 440 Brown Building, West Lafayette, IN 47906
This talk will describe a program in which students are involved in research as part of their mainstream first- and second-year chemistry courses, and will discuss data that was collected as part of the evaluation of that program. The specific research compared students' development of scientific process skills within the authentic research setting to students in a traditional laboratory setting. Data collection explored students' abilities to describe the important components of an experiment, design simple experiments, and use evidence to make claims.