Characterizing the level of inquiry in undergraduate laboratory

CHED 1470

Laura Whitson, lwhitson@purdue.edu, Department of Chemistry, Purdue Unviersity, 560 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907, Marcy Towns, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, 560 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2084, and Stacey Lowery Bretz, bretzsl@muohio.edu, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Miami University, 369 Hughes Laboratory, Oxford, OH 45056.
Consensus does not exist among chemists as to the essential characteristics of inquiry in the undergraduate laboratory. A rubric developed for K-12 science classrooms to distinguish among degrees of inquiry was modified for the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Both peer-reviewed experiments in the literature and commercially available experiments were evaluated using the rubric, revealing a diversity of uses for the word inquiry. The modified rubric has the potential to be used as a quantitative means of comparing and debating the levels of inquiry used in a specific laboratory curriculum. Faculty whose instructional goal is to move students from structured laboratory experiences to increased responsibility for decision making in the laboratory can use the rubric to evaluate experiments and make adjustments as necessary. Departments that are engaged in programmatic evaluation can use this valid and reliable metric to characterize the current curriculum.
 

Keeping it Real: Inquiry Instruction and the Chemistry Laboratory
8:30 AM-11:35 AM, Tuesday, April 8, 2008 Hilton New Orleans Riverside -- Oak Alley, Oral

Division of Chemical Education

The 235th ACS National Meeting, New Orleans, LA, April 6-10, 2008