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Not a Cookbook: Making students think during a Chemistry or Physics practical

Ed van den Berg and Marjolein Wal

 

Abstract

Many student lab instructions, even today, resemble a cookbook: “do this and then that”. That doesn’t make practicals very effective, but a cookbook format is understandable. After all, the teacher wants safe practicals in which students handle materials correctly and achieve acceptable results. In this article we provide heuristics or experience-based “recipes” to make practicals more minds-on, to make students think more, but safe and with reasonable results. Even minor changes in lab instructions and teacher guidance can lead to significant changes in demands on students thinking and reasoning [1,2]. Some of the recipes only require small rearrangements of existing laboratory worksheets and adding a minds-on focus in teacher guidance during the lab, other recipes require restructuring of existing lab instructions. The recipes were collected from both experience and science education literature [3,4,5,6,2] and have been tested by the authors and their colleagues in different countries (Netherlands, Indonesia, Philippines)