Labs are a great idea for teaching students chemistry, physics, and all the other assorted sciences. They allow students to learn for themselves just how various laws and theories work, and to hopefully discover various phenomena themselves.
Okay, correction: Labs would be a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.
I have noticed a trend in lab assignments: labs are not usually integrated into the curriculum. I don’t mean that students do labs totally irrelevant to the subject they’re learning, but that the labs seem to be thrown in as accessories to the teaching.
So if there are any teachers out there, here’s the point:
Labs are not ways to reinforce your teaching. Labs are ways to teach.
I’ll explain.
I’ve seen a few labs recently where the goal of the exercise was to prove that some physics or chemistry formula actually works. “Does your data agree with Schmoe’s Law?”, they ask. Great, suppose it does. Now does that really help me understand Schmoe’s Law and how it works? No. I just plugged my numbers into Schmoe’s Equation and it worked.
The goal of labs should be to let students figure things out for themselves. Let’s not tell students to verify Schmoe’s Law. Let’s tell them, “there might be a relationship between these two variables. Find out what it is and if there’s an equation that can describe the relationship. You get to design your own experiment to do so.”
That would be real learning.
Yes! I agree. One problem I see, though, is that it’s difficult to recreate the atmosphere of having the science be an unknown, since the students can simply read ahead and know what the answer is supposed to be.
I’m going to pull a Fermat here and say I’ve got a longer response than will go here, but I’ve expanded on them over at my place.
http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/35
I’m going to generalize a bit here and say that a lot of the students I’ve encountered aren’t really inclined to read ahead. You do make some great points, though — it could be especially interesting to apply your knowledge to a simulation as you describe in your post.
I’m guessing that they would read ahead if they felt their grade depended on it, because then they could get the “right answer.” It’s hard to convince some that getting the process right is usually more important in these circumstances.
While I do agree with you that “labs are ways to teach” (like I elaborated in my blogpost), I don’t think letting students discover an existing relationship would actually work. Like the other commenters pointed out, if a person’s grade depended on it, they would no doubt read up beforehand (personally, that’s what I would do; I’d probably even use my iPod to check online during the lab itself…). Also, in my high school, we did have some labs like this, but everyone already knew the relationship cos people talk to each other and people don’t want to fail! So essentially (and not completely consciously), we end up trying to make the data fit with the expected relationship. One of the problems here of course is that the cost of failure (lower grade) is too high. But even if you corrected that, I doubt this would work.
On the other hand, a better approach might be to ask students to build things (ungraded, of course), that way, it would be more enjoyable than simply verifying a relationship.