- What has been your personal experience with science lab activities in general?
- How are lab activities in college different or similar than those in high school?
- What do Clark, Clough and Berg identify as one key aspect of successfully modified lab activities? (try to give a different one than the person before you)
- After reading the article, what is the one muddiest point that still remains about modifying lab activities?
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Labs: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
In class we have been exploring the EXPLORE phase of the 5E learning cycle. After reading the article "Modifying Cookbook Labs" by Clark, Clough and Berg, answer the following prompts as a reply below.
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1. With lab activities, I remember enjoying them as a break from sitting in class and taking notes. I don’t remember connecting them to concepts being learned in class, which is probably because I followed procedures for most of my labs, and didn’t have to think much on my own.
ReplyDelete2. In both high school and college, I’m pretty sure I only had cookbook labs. I do not remember having a say in how the experiment will be conducted. In college, I had a better understanding that the labs would help me expand my knowledge of concepts in lecture, while in high school I saw it as a rare break from regular class.
3. One key aspect of modifying lab activities is that teachers should have positive nonverbal behaviors. The article states that these actions “demonstrate interest and withhold judgment.”
4. I am still unsure about how to give students free reign in designing their own procedures. I feel like I won’t have all the time or materials to allow them to conduct their own experiments.
Thanks Kelsey. You make a very good point in your #4 about how to control student "freedom" in terms of time and materials. Bring it up in class if I forget to!
DeleteOne strategy to use would be to provide students with a variety of materials, but tell them to create their own procedures using as many or little of the materials provided. Another would be to create the question to be answered as a class and create the experiment from there. After the experiment is created as a class, you can pull together the materials needed to carry out the experiment during the following class.
Delete1. Most of the time I don’t know what’s going during a lab! In high school the only thing I liked about lab day was that we didn’t have to sit still for 90 minutes, but when it came to answering why something happened the way it did I never felt confident in my ideas.
ReplyDelete2. Labs in college require a lot more preparation than labs in high school. In college I have readings about the topic and lab procedure and we’re often quizzed before we start the lab to see if we “know what’s going on” although you could still be clueless. I’m a chemistry major and I was even a TA for a Quant lab and I’ll admit that rarely understood the “whys” of the experiments. Luckily for me the students didn’t seem to care about the “whys,” just the “how’s:” How do I set this up? How much do I pour in here? How do I start the next step? No one cared about content because they just wanted to get through it and be done, myself included.
3. One key aspect of successfully modified lab activities is asking effective questions. When teachers used effective questioning students become engaged in their learning and begin to think more deeply about a topic. The article states: “This approach demands that students be mentally engaged and usually moves them back to testing their ideas rather than the teacher’s.”
4. I love the idea of modifying lab activities, but how can you make time to be working on one lab for three whole days (Day 1: introduction and establish lab procedure, Day 2: perform lab and collect data, Day 3: repeat lab)?
-Melanie M.
You raise some great points Melanie, I'll take them down for our discussion. I think the key is to get away from thinking of labs as these huge, intimidating 3-day ordeals, think of them as execises that can easily be done in one class period.
Delete1. I usually find science lab activities enjoyable and interesting. They definitely capture my attention more than lecturing does and I seem to learn more from lab activities than I do from lectures
ReplyDelete2. Lab activities in college are much more in depth and reflect more of what a scientist actually does in the field. There's not as much leeway to freely experiment in college labs because you have to follow the procedures given or the entire experiment is at risk. College labs are a little more frustrating, usually because there is a lot more work involved and if you mess up one little thing you have to completely start over. High school labs aren't as strict, from my experience.
3. One of the key aspects of a successfully modified lab activity is that it incorporates students' prior knowledge and uses that knowledge to build and form connections to new ideas and concepts.
4. What do you do when you have students who are stuck and can't form the connections they need to form and really just don't understand what is going on? How do you help/guide these students without stopping the class and getting behind?
- Ashley West
We can address #4 in class - Ashley will you remember to bring this up next Wednesday when we talk about transitioning out of Explorations?
Delete1. I always loved when my teachers had science lab activities planned out for class because it always helped me fully understand the concept. It was always hard for me to understand science concept until I was able to see it. The sad thing is that I hardly ever did lab activities at the middle school level. It wasn't until college that I really had to do labs on a regular basis.
ReplyDelete2. Labs in high school are laid out straight for you and require little to no thinking in order to perform the lab, while labs in college require some thought to perform the lab. Both high school and college labs help me understand the science concept because I actually get to see it in action.
3. In order to have a successfully modified lab experiment, teachers must incorporate students prior knowledge and encourage metacognition.
4. If a subject is unclear to a certain student, won't it be hard for him/her to create their own lab experiment and if so how does the teacher get around this.
I think in order to help a student that doesn't understand the topic you might could just give them extra help on the lab when needed. Also, there is a time for everything, so if many students do not understand the topic well then maybe you might should think about using more of a cookbook style lab.
Delete
ReplyDelete1. I have always enjoyed science lab activities in school since it was more interactive than lecture. Many times, the lab and the lecture were not linked and I was left feeling confused, but when the lab and content were intertwined I benefited greatly from lab activities. I did not enjoy answering questions at the end of my lab since it required that the lab went perfectly as planned.
2. Labs in college were more interesting and informative than labs in high school. In college, the pre-lab helps to set-up the context of the lab whereas in high school we read through the lab and followed the directions, which did not require a high level of critical thinking. In both contexts, however, students work through the lab as fast as possible looking for right answers. Often my classmates and I ask our peers for answers to the lab questions so that we did not have to work through the actual lab process. I suspect this happens because the labs were cook book labs and students were not thinking of the bigger picture. Labs, which are suppose to be important learning experiences, become busy work for the students to do.
3. By having students determine the essential questions to be answered, the lab becomes their own investigation instead of an assignment. I think allowing students to have ownership over their lab experiences allows them to be empowered to explore and hypothesize. This kind of modification eliminates labs as being busy work.
4. I wonder how a teacher can achieve a balance of posing challenging questions to students while they explore, but still lead students in the right direction.
By asking correct open-ended questions, teachers lead students to pose new questions and make new hypotheses about the topic while still helping students progress through the topic.
Delete1. In high school, I remember doing labs in my chemistry class that had absolutely nothing to do with the material we were covering, the teacher just wanted us to do the labs because she liked them. When I do activities such as chemistry labs, I have to start the activity knowing what content the activity relates to and the purpose of why I’m doing it. One of my main goals of being a great Earth science teacher has always been to use labs and activities to increase student understanding of the content and have them make connections. Because of my experience in high school labs, and even a few college labs, I now know what not to do when assigning lab work, because I didn’t learn anything from it.
ReplyDelete2. College and high school labs can both be extremely effective if taught the right way. I am currently in a geology lab that is directly covering what we talk about in lecture in the same order and it is really helping me understand the content. From other college lab experiences, I have learned that college labs seem to have more of a right answer than high school labs. College labs are more of a cookbook style, and students generally want to just get them over with, whereas high school labs get students excited to do something fun in class.
3. One key aspect of modifying a cookbook lab is to ask students questions that guide them to see discrepancies in their thinking and to consider alternative explanations without directly telling them the answers.
4. During the class discussion about the activity, I am sure there will be a few disengaged students who either don’t care about the activity and/or who are lost. What can I do to get them engaged and participating without embarrassing them?
1) For a lot of classes there has been a disconnect between what we did in lab and what we did in the classroom. Teachers would often say, "in lab you did blah blah blah." However, they never really connected to the bigger picture of what we were learning. Since I am a geology major, my favorite labs have been geology ones, where we have actually gone out in the field and conducted research at outcrops. It took me until my first senior year of college to understand the point of lab reports. I do not think students ever really understand the point of lab reports and simply see it as busy work. Also, in the majority of my labs there is always a right or wrong answer and you are penalized if you get the wrong answer, regardless of how the experiment went or your thought process.
ReplyDelete2) I was homeschooled and most of my labs were from a curriculum and cookbook style labs. The labs in upper-level geology classes are labs the professor has written. This gives more purpose to the labs. For me high school labs were very cookbook and not extremely thought provoking. Except my high school chemistry class. The lady who taught this class gave great background to our labs and often had us go beyond what was in the curriculum. College chemistry and physics labs were very boring to me because they were all about getting the right answer and trying to finish as soon as possible so I could leave early. There was never really any emphasis on how much we thought about our answers. And if something went wrong in our experiment we never discussed what that could tell us, we simply were given the correct answer so we could do the lab report.
3) One key aspect of successfully modified lab activities is to requires students to apply mathematical reasoning to problems.
4) I understand the aspects of a good and bad lab report, however, how exactly do we go from a good to bad one? Also, I am not sure I will have time to do every concept as in depth as what they described. How do I decide which concepts to focus on? Is a cookbook lab better than no lab at all?
"Is a cookbook lab better than no lab at all?" Great question, one I will bring up in class for your class to weigh in on. Integrating the lab activity into the learning cycle, as you point out in the first point, is key to a purposeful and worthwhile lab. That is why the Learning Cycle is a great framework, it helps you see how it connects to the prior knowledge and students making explanations about the concepts they explored.
DeleteI think the best way to create an uncooked lab is to consider the purpose of the lab and what you want your students to discover. Then make sure the introduction has limited information so students have something to discover, and then have the hands-on part be focused on what your want your kids to learn.
DeleteFor what concepts to focus on, I think you have to decide what concepts will be learned best by discover and what concepts students could learn in other ways. Also, keeping in mind several learning cycles can be happening at the same time.
I think no lab is better than a cookbook lab, but you can uncook a cookbook lab, which is the best solution.
1. In the past, I always enjoyed doing labs because it was a nice break from the lectures and power point slides, but there was never a connection between the lab and the class material. There would usually be one line that connected a little piece of the material, but never enough for me to make sense of the lab. One time in high school we got to dissect a frog, which was really fun, but the only thing I took away from that lab was the nasty smell.
ReplyDelete2. I think in college, the professors do a better job at connecting the material to the labs. The lab professors always do an overview of the lab that connects in back to the lecture material. Also there is usually a better explanation of WHY we are performing the lab in this certain way, and why we will or will not get the expected outcome.
3. One of the key aspects of a successfully modified lab activity is proper wait time. This allows for other students to provide their input, and time for the students to think about the response.
4. I think that modifying the 'cookbook labs' is really important, but I'm afraid I will try to do this, and not relay the message I'm hoping to. Are there any other key factors besides the ones mentioned in the article to help our students gain a better long-term understanding of science concepts?
I think I now understand the importance of bringing in prior knowledge and modifying the labs so that students are able to think more instead of being told more. When students are just being told a lot of information, they do not process the 'whys' and 'hows' of the experiments. When we modify these labs to have open ended questions and hands on experiences, students are more likely to gain and remember more from these experiments.
Delete1. My personal lab experiences have been really good. I feel that I learned the most when doing lab activities. This is probably because lab activities are hands on and I can experience the learning for myself. Lecture was the boring part of science and labs were the more fun part of science.
ReplyDelete2. In college my professors would not give any instruction, and make you figure out all most all by yourself. This was not helpful at all. I would catch myself totally not connected to the material because I had no idea what I was doing. In middle and high school the teacher gave way more instruction. This was helpful because they could figure out if we knew what we were doing or not.
3. One key part of the article is the effective questioning. This is super important in order to find out what the students are understanding and what they are not. This does not include pointless questions. The most important part of effective questioning is making sure that as a teacher, you have a purpose for the questions you ask.
4. One things I am not completely sure about is how do you know when the students need a list of some step instructions or when they can figure out how to do it all for themselves?
Students need more instructions when the lab is more complicated. If you feel that students will not know how to do something then that is when you tell them how to do it or at least ask questions that will show them how to do something. If they already know how to do it there is no reason to tell them. It also matters what you want them to get out of the lab. If the product is not the important aspect of the lab but the thinking is then add instructions that will direct their thinking in the right place.
Delete1. Science lab activities are difficult to do correctly as a teacher, but also as a student. It takes time to develop the skill of questioning students. As a student, it takes time to develop the skills necessary to complete a lab activity correctly. Forming hypotheses, generating lists of observations, collecting and organizing data, and interpreting data is not something that comes naturally for students. Without practice these skills will not develop and students and teachers will struggle with these activities.
ReplyDelete2. The high school lab activities completed by students were very simple. Rarely involving many materials if any at all. Most activities were completed by the teacher in the front of the room. This hinders students ability to learn how to function in a lab. Once I got to college, I had basically no lab skills. Especially in college, science labs are often highly procedural with your grade reflecting how well you are able to follow the list of directions given to you. This approach seems to take away the investigative nature of a lab activity. One lab in high school AP biology was repeated in high school, but was more mainstreamed in college. The lab was on testing for proteins and starches. We used compounds in college that were pre-determined. In high school we tested a McDonald’s happy meal.
3. One of the main reasons behind modification of lab activities should be to access students prior knowledge. Each classroom full of students is unique, so modifying the activity to access this knowledge is extremely important. The prior knowledge is then challenged by the new experiences of the activity, and metacognition is encouraged.
4. It seemed as though the modifying lab activities article would be much more drastic than what was described. I interpreted the term “cookbook lab” to be something that was oversimplified, boring, and overused. This lead me to the notion that the lab needs much work to incorporate higher level thinking. I took away from this article it depends more on how the teacher presents the lab, and asks questions. Is this as simple as the modification needs to be?
Sometimes, depending on how 'cooked' the cookbook lab is, the changes are more drastic. The modifications are typically simple because you are often given too much information. The difficult part lies in the questioning which is designed to bring out the information that you are having students explore. Keeping the lab as student lead as possible is the goal of uncooking a lab.
Delete1. In my own experiences, most labs in college and high school were procedurally based, and the procedures we followed were meant to support a concept we were learning as part of lecture, however the procedural steps we followed were often not explained in enough detail for us to understand what was really going on 100% of the time.
ReplyDelete2. Labs in high school were much less supervised for me, because I had a chemistry teacher that would give us safety instructions then basically let us work in groups figuring out things until lab was over. College lab experiences were much more structured and explicit. The goal was to get a reproducible, correct answer in most lab experiences.
3. Successful altered lab experiences are student-driven, in which as much of the procedure possible is explained and in some cases governed by students themselves. The teacher must guide students to the procedure, not simply provide the procedure whole-cloth.
4. Modifying the labs in this way seems to take up a significant amount of time vs. unmodified labs. My main concern is that of the added time. If every lab we do is modified to optimize student involvement, what will we have to cut in order to ensure they are engaging with the material and thinking critically about their experiments? Will this mean less content coverage in the classroom long-term yet greater understanding of the content we do cover?
Great question, JAson. This is exactly the idea of "less is more" as described in all reformed science ed documents. (How much do students remember, anyway, when you "cover" enormous amounts of content as we do in into classes at college?) However, there are certainly implications about running an "efficient" class. We should talk about what that means...if you can, try to remember to bring this up in our next class!
DeleteModified labs have a better chance at getting students to engage with the material, yet the often take up more time. This exchange of time for greater understanding, more memorable lab experiences, and increased critical thinking in the classroom can often make up for the time lost. If teaching students about scientific process, and engaging them with the material on a deeper level is your goal, uncooked labs are definitely the way to go. Ideally creating these labs and enacting them as a class would work best in a flipped learning classroom, in which content coverage is mainly taking place as homework and in-class time is spent on inquiry based demos, labs, and discussions. If you budget your time correctly, these types of labs can be used more often in a more traditional-style classroom, perhaps at the expense of content you might like to cover but that isn't strictly part of the standards (in my case, human physiology, zoology, evolutionary history, etc.). In some cases, in order to facilitate learning in this way, it might be necessary to cover less material yet in a deeper way. Providing the structure students need to learn via inquiry as well as providing a meaningful content-rich learning experience for students should be the goal. Not just inquiry through activity, but inquiry based learning though engagement.
DeleteSarah Swendsrud
ReplyDelete1) My experience with science lab activities varies with each different school that I have been to. At home, the lab activities backed up what we read in the text book. At the community college, the science lab activities helped commit covered material into memory where ASU lab activities supposedly cover the material. However, there are many times where I have no idea what the purpose of the lab is until usually the end of the week.
2) For high school, I was able to expand on experiments to discover the "answer" to further questions on the activity. At college, most if not all lab experiments are cookbook labs where we follow the directions and don't deviate. For college, I was able to understand the reason behind the experiment after I had written the lab report.
3) One key aspect to the modified labs is keeping your students engaged in the lab. The article had tips on how to teach a modified lab by either guiding students towards certain questions, to apply knowledge to data, and encourage their interpretation.
4) I am still unsure how to really modify the labs and keep my students on the right track without taking up more time than what is allotted.
Modified labs can still be kept on track depending on how the teacher directs the questioning and guides the students towards the main goal of the lab.
Delete1. When it came to lab activities in past experiences, I feel as though they did help but they weren’t as helpful as they should have been. Bad planning on the part of the teacher in which I had these labs are the reasoning behind this.
ReplyDelete2. Lab activities in college are much more condensed and confusing than they were in high school. I do find them to be more helpful to the content that I am learning, however.
3. Asking effective questioning. I think is what I had an issue in with high school labs. The questions they asked didn’t help me learn the content any better, but instead confused me. By asking effective questions it helps the students learn what they are doing better.
4. I am still unsure to give students their own freedom when coming up with lab events. I feel like by doing this it may give them too much power, which will then make them take advantage of me as a teacher.
Drake Long
It has helped me to answer many of these questions that had on this post. It has helped me to realize that you can give students a lot of freedom, but making sure they are on task. It has also showed that you can almost use any given experiment as long as you bring it to the grade level of the students that you are teaching. In some ways it also presents a way of teaching the students what the wording of some college level labs will be, to an extent.
DeleteDrake Long
1. My labs have always been very cookbook like. We had a list of instructions that we had to follow, and we did them. There was never really any intense instructions or even guided. It was always if I needed help I should raise my hand, and if not they would just be roaming around the room.
ReplyDelete2. In college we normally have a prelab lecture that give me some idea of what to do, but then I am on my own reading my manual. It is the same thing as high school just higher stakes, and more work.
3. I think asking effective questions is really important, because it will work as a road map for the students, and help guide them to the final location. Also asking the right question can make the students be more excited and engaged in what they are learning, and creates a better environment for cognitive construction
4. I am still a little fuzzy on how I can tell if I have altered a cookbook method effectively without testing it on students. By this point isn't too late?
Every first time you do something with the students is a learning experience! In my experience, most of the kinks are usually worked about by the third time through the same course. Your third year students will always have a wiser teacher than the students from your first couple years! ...and so on! Just keep learning as you go...we are just helping you understand what to aim for!
DeleteThere is a visual difference in the two labs, and I think now that I have done it you can easily tell the difference. A cookbook lab may have procedures but it most defiantly ask more questions, and keeps the students thinking.
DeleteScotty Greer
1) My personal experience with science labs has been fine and dandy, as far as I can recall. I certainly remember doing “cookbook” labs where all of the instructions are laid out and there is no room for creativity and so forth, but I have also been a part of labs where almost everything is left up to the students. I can report that the labs which gave me as a student the most intellectual freedoms came from my Physics classes in high school (and in college). Perhaps that is because of the nature of Physics. For example, most people could correctly construct a lab set-up where the goal is to measure what percentage of the original height a ball will bounce back to when dropped, but most people probably won’t be able to correctly set up a Chemistry lab where the goal is to determine the overall percentage of water within a certain type of crystal.
ReplyDelete2) I have just mentioned that my college-level Physics courses gave great freedoms to students when they conduct lab experiments, and that this was also true for my Physics classes in high school. What is also true, though, is that my Chemistry labs were similar in both high school and college, but in the opposite way—that they greatly limited students’ freedoms. As far as I can remember, my Chemistry labs have all been “cookbooks” where students follow the concise steps, fill in the pre-arranged tables and charts, found a specific value for something, and came up with their answers without much trouble as long as the directions were followed. I can tell you, though, that I greatly preferred the Physics labs. Also, I despise the Chemistry Department at ASU; I found them to be snobby, arrogant, self-righteous, and altogether ‘holier than thou art’—but that is a subject for another day.
3) Clark, Clough, and Berg claim that fielding answers appropriately is a key aspect of successfully modified lab activities. Oftentimes when a teacher asks a question, the students raise their hands one by one and the teacher calls on them until one of them answers correctly, and then the teacher moves on to the next question. Clark, Clough, and Berg urge teachers to field all answers and allow time for discussion of the answers rather than taking the first correct answer and barreling forward in the lesson from there. They understand that there is incredible complexity concerned with how to set up a lab or how the lab results were found, and that whole-class discussions about these things are important. “Students share ideas as they work, and although procedures may differ somewhat from group to group, all safe procedures are accepted.”
4) The muddies point that still remains for me after I read the article is ‘what is the best way to inform a student that the procedure they proposed is completely wrong and that they will gain nothing from approaching the lab that way?’ And if the best way is to take the time to explain why their procedure is not appropriate, wouldn’t that take way too long to do every time??
1. I have had a few classes where labs have been extremely well run. There is no surrendering of knowledge by the teacher, rather utilization of prior knowledge and deductive reasoning that pushes students towards learning and discovery on their own. A vast majority however are very poorly run with a very specific procedure to follow.
ReplyDelete2. University lab experiences have been very poorly run. Nearly all of the labs are following the procedure from a book with a specific outcome that will be graded. These require little thought and much direction following. I was fortunate with some high school teachers that were good at questioning and structuring labs.
3. Positive nonverbal behaviors that are actions demonstrating interest and withholding judgment. “These include appropriate eye contact, physical proximity to students, open body language, animated gestures, encouraging facial expressions, and good posture”
4. It appears that serious preparation and prediction of student responses are necessary for an effective lab. A deep understanding of the topic and how you are going to direct the lab towards the intended outcomes is a major part of this process. My concern is deciding how to phrase questions in such a way that that they are constructive and continue to push students forward, especially when presented with an unplanned idea.
I believe having a larger structure with planned outcomes leading into the next phase of the learning cycle. The questions will be modified with trial and error but can be pre-planned based on the activity and the direction the lab is headed.
Delete1. I usually find science lab activities enjoyable and interesting. They definitely capture my attention more than lecturing does and I seem to learn more from lab activities than I do from lectures
ReplyDelete2. Lab activities in college are much more in depth and reflect more of what a scientist actually does in the field. There's not as much leeway to freely experiment in college labs because you have to follow the procedures given or the entire experiment is at risk. College labs are a little more frustrating, usually because there is a lot more work involved and if you mess up one little thing you have to completely start over. High school labs aren't as strict, from my experience.
3. One of the key aspects of a successfully modified lab activity is that it incorporates students' prior knowledge and uses that knowledge to build and form connections to new ideas and concepts.
4. What do you do when you have students who are stuck and can't form the connections they need to form and really just don't understand what is going on? How do you help/guide these students without stopping the class and getting behind?
- Ashley West
I think that when you have student oriented lab activities that require students to work in groups it will be easier for the student to receive help because he/she will be working with peers who can explain to them. Also, they will be doing the experiment first hand and will get to see how the results play out which should, hopefully, answer any of the questions they have. Even if it does not help, there should be time for students to share their results with each other and use each other’s results to answer questions. At this point the teacher will also be able to step in and help answer questions for the whole class without taking too much time away from the lesson. I think that when the labs are made to be more student inquiry based and more interactive for them, the students will not have as many problems understanding what is going on
Delete1. Most of the time I don’t know what’s going during a lab! In high school the only thing I liked about lab day was that we didn’t have to sit still for 90 minutes, but when it came to answering why something happened the way it did I never felt confident in my ideas.
ReplyDelete2. Labs in college require a lot more preparation than labs in high school. In college I have readings about the topic and lab procedure and we’re often quizzed before we start the lab to see if we “know what’s going on” although you could still be clueless. I’m a chemistry major and I was even a TA for a Quant lab and I’ll admit that rarely understood the “whys” of the experiments. Luckily for me the students didn’t seem to care about the “whys,” just the “how’s:” How do I set this up? How much do I pour in here? How do I start the next step? No one cared about content because they just wanted to get through it and be done, myself included.
3. One key aspect of successfully modified lab activities is asking effective questions. When teachers used effective questioning students become engaged in their learning and begin to think more deeply about a topic. The article states: “This approach demands that students be mentally engaged and usually moves them back to testing their ideas rather than the teacher’s.”
4. I love the idea of modifying lab activities, but how can you make time to be working on one lab for three whole days (Day 1: introduction and establish lab procedure, Day 2: perform lab and collect data, Day 3: repeat lab)?
“Ultimately students will get the most out of labs where they are required to do more of the thinking process behind developing the experiment. A lab does not have to last three class periods, but it can be used to refer back to in later lessons. These labs just need to be planned for in the lesson and will not be used for every single topic in the curriculum.”
DeleteWhat has been your personal experience with science lab activities in general?
ReplyDelete- Science labs usually allow me to learn more than I ever have listening to anyone talking.
How are lab activities in college different or similar than those in high school?
- Labs in high school made me feel like I was learning where was in college I felt like I was only to labs to find the answer that my instructor already had. Normally I did not perform these correctly.
What do Clark, Clough and Berg identify as one key aspect of successfully modified lab activities? (try to give a different one than the person before you)
- I think that when students are asked to come up with their own idea of a conclusion or the results of the activity rather than the teacher asking for a particular feedback.
After reading the article, what is the one muddiest point that still remains about modifying lab activities?
- How do you make an activity that is really fun and interactive more than just that? How do you make sure that the content is still taught through the activity that students do?
Ellie Atkins
DeleteELLIE ATKINS
DeleteKeeping students on task and focused on the content or the exploration you are trying to have them understand are the things that are most important when you are really trying to engage your students and have them lead their own explorations. Also, preview all of your activites thouroughly and make sure that there are oppourtunities for learning and content discovery.