What Hath OSHA Wrought? Miles Pickering Princeton University, Princeton. NJ 08520 To he asked to report ahout teaching lahs is a little likerenortine on whoo~ine . ..cranes. For teachine lahs are. above all else, an endangered species. To see the'dirnensions of this ~mhlem.consider the data in the table whirh list? the lab time iequirements for a BS in chemistry a t Princeton and the building space allocated for chemistry lahoratory teaching. In hoth cases the 1983 numhers are about 40% of their 1965 values. I t is nwessary, of course, to qualify these data. Obviously, Princeton is not the world. Many of the smaller colleges I have seen require more lab work. There are places, however, such as our competitor in Massachusetts, which offer even fewer hours. I t is also true that chemistry has changed since 1965. I t takes less time to do a gravimetric analysis with an electronic balance than if you have to count the swings of a twopan balance. And it is faster to take an NMR than to make a derivative. But the fact remains that, a t many institutions, lab education is not what it once was. hv a lone shot. Whv not? First. the questions of hazard and liab"ility have hecomemuch more of an issue. Second, lab courses take time to teach, and faculty are more and more pressed for tangible research results. Third, althoueh the hriehtest and most able minds once went into " the scientific disciplines, major departments now feel compelled to take out full-page journal advertisements to attract
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Lab Then and Now
Space allocated (sq. ft) Total Labs required (34, periods)
19A5
19Rd
28.000 150
12.000 60
potential graduate students. Fourth, students were never fond of lahs, and their voice has recently been heard much more than before. Fifth, the cost of lahoratories in terms of hoth chemicals and equipment is constantly escalating. All of these factors have put stresses on traditional lahoratory education in chemistry. Thia paper will focus on how many chemical educators have responded to these stresses. The Response to Potential Hazards in the Undergraduate Laboratory The increased attention to safetv has s~awnedsome of the most exciting innovations in teaching lahbratories. In the old Lavs, the test of neelieence for a lahoratorv teacher was the ''pmdent man" r u l e r ~ h c much e less was know about toxicity, carcinogenesis, or industrial hygiene, it was easier to he a "prudent man." Then, in 1970, OSHA was founded, and standards were defined in areas that had been left vague he-
Volume 61 Number 10 October 1984
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fore. "Prudent man" came t o have a very precise meaning. This, combined with an increasingly litigatious society, meant a retreat from a number of previously traditional practices. In most cases, this is t o the good. Even if we can not educate anybody, it seems appropriate to send our students home with the original number of hands and eyes. The response to hazard (and related disposal) problems has been surp&ingly creative. One of the most innovative is the microscale lab (1,Z). In this approach, synthetic work is done a t the level of hundreds of milligrams. Despite the small scale on which experiments are done, characterization is still possible by the~usualinstrumental methods. There are several advantages u, this approach. First, it is cheap. Srcond it is safe. While 20 e of KCN is a real hazard. 100 me is well helow the LD50. &hermore, disposal, air p&tionyand flammability hazards are also vastlv reduced. While the stated purpose of the microscale lab was to meet OSHA constraints. this a~nroachturned out to have a number of unexpected side benefits. First, since quantities are small, thev can be warmed and cooled raoidlv. Time saved can be usid for other experiments, or to reduce the tedium of lab. Furthermore, not as much time is lost if a student has to start over. One might argue that students do not have the manual dexterity to do small-scale synthesis. Surprisingly, ohservations do not bear this out. The students seem to have no more problems a t this scale than they do in any other organic lab. At present, work is going - - on a t Bowdoin, Brown, and other places, butit will be a t least a few years before this approach can be made cheap enough (conversionto microware is costly), and before reliable, debugged cexts will be available. In the end, however, almost all synthetic chemistry will he taught this way. Another approach, which has been widely copied, is the totally hooded lab. At Cal Tech, for example (3), each student has a hood, or half hood, to work in. The student hoods line the walls, and in the center is a glass-walled room with the instrumentation. At Cal Tech, students start with real instruments (IR, GC, etc.) from the beginning. The lab is extraordinarily effective because it is project-oriented, cuts across arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, and is very heavily staffed. This lab offers an almost perfect environment to train potential scientists. Lab Management Specialists There is no auestion that lab courses are time-consuming and difficult to Lath well. This is partly because s u m often devends on endless details, each in itself trivial, but each enbugh, if neglected, to derail the whole operation. Furthermore, in large courses, one has to teach through other people, through TA's. This is a difficult task involving a management role in which few faculty are comfortable. Finally, unlike lectures, which are highly visible, the "invisibility" of lab teaching lends one's colleagues t o underrate its difficulty. Manv, research-oriented denartments have resnonded to this problem by delegating lab management t o a new species of ouasi-facultv. This latter trend has meant a hureeoninn opportunity fo; many people (myself included), a n z i t ma; eventuallv mean that lab manaeement will evolve into a distinct speciality. If rermlar leaves are provided, if there is some machinew for rotating teachingas&nments, and if there is a strong iicenthe for independent scholarnhi~(as at Princeton), this is a healthy arrangement for both theschool and the individual. Often. however. success in such jobs is judaed solely by the amount of weight lifted from faiulty shoulders, and the resulting "mindrot" caused in part by institutional policies is unfortunately blamed on the inadequacies of the individual. But, with some safeguards, it does not seem to me that this form of specialization is any less healthy than any other. Certainly it is an unmistakable trend. ~
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Journal of Chemical Education
The Role ol Teaching Assistants in the Lab Our lab courses have also felt pressures from increased competition for qualified graduate students. Many graduate departments are havine a roueh time attracting enough s h a w had one b e n d qualified teaching assistants. ~ h , may rial side effect. however. The concern ahout traching assistants a t man; institutions bas spawned a number-of TA training programs. The most famous of these programs is, of course, David Brooks' Project TEACH (4). This program is directed a t teaching pedagogy, not content. Judging by its wide adoption, it fulfills a perceived need a t many places. The stress on pedagogical training, as opposed to subject matter training, is new in chemistry. nroerams The most imoortant feature of these TA trainine-. -is the fact that they show an increasing awareness by the academic community that lab programs depend crucially on TA teaching prowess and that something could, should, and can be done to improve it. TA skills are no loneer taken for granted. ~ h e t h ' e the r current approaches a e the hest possible is tar less important than the fact that sharp mind^ are be. ginning to worry about this problem. Student Distaste for Labs The fourth factor in the litany of woes that has beset lab courses is the student distaste for labs. This has always been there, I suspect, but has become increasingly important as more and more students are allowed to vote with their feet. There have heen vnrious attempts to change curricula to interest students in the lab. M y own concern has been the way "strwture"-the grading, requirements and udministrative nrocedures-influences students' attitude towards lab. Our group has done a number of research studies in this area, bringing the heavy guns of statiairs to bear on practice^ that are traditionally unexamined. Traditional labs are riddled with rules which areoften unnecessary. Many institutions, for example, require students to submit leeitimate excuses before thev let them come to lab a t a different time. Although this may"be necessary a t institutions where lab space is a t a nremium, we have taken the attitude that we do not care wheiher the student does the work on Tuesday or on Thursday, as long as the work is in fact done. At its worst, an excused absence rule alienates students. At its best, it just means that a lot of faculty time is spent on trivia instead of the real business of life (writing learned papers or carrving on faculty feuds). There will always be a few abusers, and; few procrasiinators, but the majority of students are so relieved that they can come in an extra day to finish an experiment that it is well worth the risk. By lowering the level of pressure, this simple structural change improves the quality of laboratory life immensely ( 5 , 6 ) . The insistence on using reports as grading tools rather than learning tools is another standard practice about which I am unhappy (17, 8). We have switched to an all-test grading system, with only minimal weight on lab reports. This has brought uniformity across sections, and it removes the incentive t o elephantiasis that so often afflicts report-based systems. But more important the TA is now cast in a helping, resource nerson role. He or she can work with the student towards the goal of test performance. Few TA's function well in an authority figure role-they are just too young. I t is far better to letthem slip into the elder sibling role that they enjoy and to give the student a feeling that somebody really cares. We need to remember that, for most students, lab is a difficult and scary experience, and if we can restru&ure it into a less tense one, students will be more acceptine. . .. I am not sure that my studenk will ever take great joy in experimental work, but at least thev no loncer gripe endlessly about the lab, and some even admit it is-fun. The ~ r i n c & n experience has
convinced me that it is possible to have a rigorous lab that is not bitterly hated. New Dlrectlons In Introductory Laboratories
The last ten years have seen several new directions in undergraduate lahoratories ( 9 ) . A number of inquiry-based programs have been developed to enhance learning in the laboratory (IO-16).Other groups have tried to integrate lahoratories across the boundaries between disciplines (17-20). to replace the typical cookbook lab with project-oriented laboratories (21-24), or tailor the lab experience to the needs of the individual students through flexible lab (12)or Keller plan approaches (25-26).Attention is even heing paid a t long last to the problems of the handicapped student in the laho.. ratory (27%).
needed. From the kinds of issues I have discussed, it is obvious that the solution is not just a matter of buying a few personal computers, or replacing experiment X with experiment Y. It is a question of how theexperiment is presented, and what the student is rewarded for. Safety is not a frill, it isasine uua "on. We do not teach our lab courses, our TA's do, and their motivation and training is of more than passing importance. Lab grading and management have to he lookedat, $only because they so heavily affect student attitudes. And we have to recognize that reform costs both faculty time and institutional resources. But nowhere in education is there ereater untanned notential. For good lab courses do not just create skilled technicians,. thev. have the potential to heln create educated men and women, in the classical liheral arts tradition.
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Changes In Lab as an Example of Le Chatelier's Prlnclple
What worries me about the state of the art of teaching labs is that a t most colleges and universities, the changes heing made are largely responses rather than new initiatives. We have responded to the hazard concerns, and started t o meet them. We have responded to the changing mix of graduate students. Manv educators have resoonded to the various stress that havd been placed on the laboratory, hut relatively few have initiated new lab courses or new programs for educational reasons. We are in full-scale retreat. This retreat would have heen almost inconceivable to past generations, and it is unfortunate, because, while lecture can teach the facts of science. onlv in the lab can one do science. Experimental work and h e deliefin experiment as a way of answering questions is what distinguishes science from the previous great intellectual world systems. By downgrading the lahoratory component of scientific training we give a view of science that is not quite correct. I t is like looking a t a street lit a t night by sodium lights. Every detail is still visible, hut the colors are wrong. We end up teaching "what we know" rather than the equally important "how do we know it." I cannot help helieving that a well-designed lab offers an educationally unique experience. If the student is expected to put a question to Nature instead of just verifying what he or she already knows or appeasing the instructor with the expected answer and if thestudentis expected to reason logically about the resulting data, then he or she grows mentally. The result is confidence in the face of ambiguity that characterizes a mature and educated mind. I cannot help helieving that something, if only self-confidence,was produced by 150 periods of lah a t Princeton that is not produced by 60 periods. And I cannot help feeling that one's instrumental repertoire has t o he bigger, not smaller, these days. Even our lowly premeds will ultimately practice "electronic medicine," and the sooner they master an instrument, any instrument, the better. However, most faculty have yet to convince themselves that lab is salvaeeahle. that chanee is oossihle. or that lah is even worth saving. ~ r k s e n student t labs do not offer much encouragement to those who envision something better. And while it is easy to change a lecture course, changing a lab course is hard work. For if labs are to improve, real reform a t a deep level will he
Literature Cited (1, Rulzher.S.S..Meyo. D \I' . P I ~ ~ . M.. K . Fmu.C M.. H u h m J . K..end P i c e . D S . .I P H Y HEDVC. ~ n p m , (2) Mwo.U. W.,Hul
