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.<\/p>\n
Okay, correction: Labs would be<\/em> a great idea if they were used for the above purpose. But they aren’t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So if there are any teachers out there, here’s the point:<\/p>\n Labs are not ways to reinforce your teaching. Labs are ways to teach.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I’ll explain.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The goal of labs should be to let students figure things out for themselves<\/em>. 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.”<\/p>\n That would be real learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/capn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}