Do Secondary School Laboratory Texts Reflect the Goals of the " ~ e w "Science curricula? Marlene Fuhrman Nape~illeCentral High School. Nape~ille,IL 60540 Vincent N. Lunetta The University of lowa, lowa City, IA 52242 Shimshon Novick Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel The central role of the lahoratory in the teaching of chemistry has been highlighted in a variety of statements by chemistry educators. The curricula of the 1960's according to their advocates and authors were sunaosed .. to shift lahoratorv exercises from simply demonstrating or verifying known information to raising oroblems. develonine inouirv skills. and providing o p p o r t u n ~ ~for e s "d&covery> while the labor&ry has long been used to provide ex~erienceswith obiects. " . concepts, and experiments, the "new" science curricula were supposed to provide students with opportunities to engage in the process of inquiry and investigation. Laboratory work, previously divorced from science classroom learning, was to become an integral part of class work, involving pre- and post-laboratory discussion (1-8). Do current curriculum materials in chemistry reflect these goals? Early in the 1970's Herron (9) pointed out that an overwhelming proportion of laboratory activities in the new curricula of the 1960's still provided students with the definition of a problem, gave them a set of procedures to employ, and often gave them a key against which to check answers. T h e study reported in this paper is an effort to extend some of ~ e r i o n ' swork and to analyze laboratory handbooks in contemporary chemistry curricula in terms of the inauirv . - and problem-solving behaviors expected of students. While the laboratory handbook is only one of many. inare. dients in a science claisroom, it plays a~majorrole for most teachers and students in defining goals and procedures for laboratorv activities. It also helos to focus observations and the development of inferences, explanations, and other activities in a laboratorv investieation. Knowledee about what students actually do,-if they follow the instruEtions in their lahoratory guide, enables chemistry teachers to modify activities to be more consistent with imporant goals of teaching. Method
An instrument, first reported by Tamir and Lunetta (10) and later revised (11) was used to analyze the exercises in the laboratory handhooks of the following chemistry curricula: the latest CHEM Study editions (12-14); "Modern Chemistry" (6);and IAC (Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chemistry (7). The lahoratory exercises were examined to determine their organization and the specific tasks required of students. In the analvsis of oreanization. we attemoted to determine how the laboratory work was integrated with other parts of the chemistry course. Thus, we examined whether the experiment is highly structured, whether the experiment precedes or follows the introduction of the topic in the text, and whether students are expected to work cooperatively or alone. Student tasks were assessed in terms of the inquiry skills and behaviors required by the laboratory work. We asked, for example, whether the student was required to formulate questions to be investigated or to follow prescribed instructions, whether the experiment required qualitative ohserva-
tions or quantitative measurement, and how the data were to he analvzed. The analysis of laboratory organization and of the required tasks is summarized in Tahles 1and 2 and reveals some interesting answers to the following questions. A
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