Four principles on learning will help you make decisions about AI in your classroom.
Learning in the Chemistry Lab: Beyond Following Instructions
Lab work is the beating heart of chemistry education. It gives students opportunities for not only doing chemistry, but also thinking, feeling, striving, and even failing together. In the lab, students move beyond following instructions and become knowledge makers, problem solvers, and resilient thinkers. But how do students truly learn in the lab?
Being "minds-on" while "hands-on"
Traditional lab teaching often assumes that as long as students handle chemicals and instruments, learning happens automatically. But research shows otherwise. Discussing concepts, voicing questions, and even acknowledging hesitations or doubt are as important as chemicals and beakers for learning in the lab.
This is what we refer to as being "minds-on" while being "hands-on". While doing their lab work, students co-construct knowledge with peers, reasoning through complexities and uncertainties. They don't just follow recipes—they question, hypothesize, and reflect on what they actually do in the lab.
The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Lab Learning
Life in the lab is multi-dimensional. Understanding these dimensions can transform how we teach:
1. Cognitive Dimension
Students design experiments, seek explanations, and interpret findings. In doing so, they contextualize chemical concepts within scientific practices.
2. Affective Dimension
Emotions matter in the lab. Confusion when things don't work out, frustration with unexpected results, and joy when predictions align with observations. These emotional experiences are part of authentic chemistry practice, and many chemists can testify to this.
The key is normalizing these experiences, especially those we might consider "negative emotions." When they contribute to productive struggles in the lab, they actually motivate students to investigate further and find out more. Below you'll find more information about how to do this.
3. Conative Dimension
This dimension involves striving, motivation, and willpower. Students push through setbacks and failure through peer support and the perseverance nurtured by working together.
4. Embodied Dimension
Lab learning is something you do with your body—it's a physical experience. Our sensory experiences play a crucial role in helping us understand the scientific phenomena we observe.
Active Learning in the Lab
Real active learning in the lab involves students solving unexpected problems together, sometimes by making mistakes or using each other's data. Students should be debating uncertainties and sources of error while coming to terms with the reality that not every experiment goes as planned. The work should be built on the understanding that experiencing setbacks, failures, and making mistakes are important parts of learning. This means that teachers need to reframe these experiences as learning opportunities so that students are motivated to investigate further.
Implications for Teaching
Teachers should strive to create lab curricula that encourage design and deliberation, not just completion. Through scenario design and dialogic feedback, teachers can prompt students to talk about the science behind the experiments they are doing, discuss their process and results. Create a lab culture where:
- Mistakes are discussed openly.
- Emotions are acknowledged.
- Negative experiences are normalized.
- Positive moments are celebrated.
- Resilience is nurtured through reflection and continual discussion.
Teachers can facilitate this process of deliberation and discussion by giving dialogic prompts and feedback throughout the lab experience - see more about how to this below.
Epistemic Affect in the Chemistry Lab: Understanding Emotions in Scientific Learning
Epistemic affect refers to emotions and feelings that students experience when they do chemistry in the lab. By being aware of and recognizing affective experiences, teachers can help students normalize negative experiences such as frustration or epistemic anxiety while celebrating positive ones such as joyful moments and curiosity.
Recent research shows that epistemic affect also contributes to students' identity development as future chemists or scientists, as these experiences mirror the actual work of professional chemists and scientists.
Designing Lab Curricula That Foster Epistemic Affect
To foster epistemic affect in the lab, it's important to design curricula that allow students to:
- Discuss their experimental plans and designs.
- Interpret data without having to arrive at one single correct answer.
- Explore results that are open to interpretation and discussion.
The key is deliberation. During these discussions, encourage students to explore and question the scientific principles behind the experiment. This deliberative process mirrors authentic chemistry practice.
What Is Dialogic Feedback?
Teachers need to encourage students to talk about science and chemistry, the underlying principles and theory as well as the affective and emotional experiences. As a teacher you can prompts this with dialogic feedback.
One purpose of dialogic feedback is making explicit what students actually experience emotionally. Sometimes it's as simple as asking: "How do you feel about this?"
We don't do this enough. As a result, subtle facial expressions, frustrations, and confusion tend to miss our radar as teachers—perhaps because we simply don't know how to deal with them, and we don't encourage students to acknowledge these as truly human experiences.
Through dialogic feedback you can acknowledge that these experiences are part of the whole process of doing chemistry, and thus normalize any negative feelings and emotions.
Dialogic prompts and feedback is especially important when student need to move past epistemic anxiety. Epistemic anxiety is often related to not knowing what is going on, or when there are inconsistencies between anticipated data and actual experimental outcomes. Teachers can guide student thinking with prompts like:
Now that you have some discrepancies in your experimental data, how do you think you can resolve this discrepancy? Are you supposed to repeat the whole experiment, or can you use data from another group? You could compare your results with theirs, see what they did and what you did, and perhaps trace these mistakes back to the particular part of the experiment, that you can discuss in your report."
The purpose of this feedback is to help students when they feel anxious about not knowing something in their experiment—when they didn't expect something to happen or didn't see it coming. This kind of dialogic feedback guides them to find solutions to their "problem" with not knowing.