Chemical Education Today edited by
Erica K. Jacobsen Associate Editor, Precollege Chemistry
Laura E. Slocum
Lab Reports
Assistant Editor, Precollege Chemistry
Laura E. Slocum and Erica K. Jacobsen I am not sure why these two words brought more stress to me this past year than any other, but they did. I have also heard from more teachers than ever that lab reports have been one of their biggest frustrations as well. Their comments left me feeling not so alone, but also wondering what is up with the students and lab reports. I love doing hands-on activities and labs with my students, but reading and grading the lab reports became a more daunting task than ever for me this year, especially the reports of my first-year students. Many of them could not put together an error analysis no matter how many times we talked about it, practiced it, or rewrote them in class. I finally just let the students get the grades they earned, because I knew that I had truly done all I could to help them improve in this area and they now needed to put in the effort or not. That was not an easy thing for me to accept as a teacher. I talked with a few of the humanities faculty at my school and found that this year they required students to write more papers overall. Initially, I “blamed” my students' poor performance on lab reports on the “extra work” that my colleagues were asking of them. However, what I really knew I needed to do was to take a harder look at my own courses and my approaches to lab reports. One thing that I consistently do when I attend conferences is to talk with university faculty at various size schools and find out what they require their students to do at the college level in regard to lab reports. This is important to me because I teach at a college-prep school. So, besides teaching my students chemistry, I also want them to have strong skills for college. I have found these conversations insightful, but not always directly helpful in guiding my own approach to lab reports. This is primarily because each professor has their own style and their class size often directs how they have their students do the lab reports in their courses. I was encouraged by MacNeil and Falconer's article (DOI: 10.1021/ed100303y) where they reminded us, “In the real world of science, good note-taking skills in the lab are not only essential, they are required. Lawsuits, patents, and careers have all been made or lost based on what was in, or not in, lab notebooks.” (1). They describe methods they incorporated into their laboratory curriculum to help their students take better notes in their lab notebooks, also a problem for many students. If students have better notes, they should be better prepared to write a more thorough lab report. Though I know some college students, particularly in a general chemistry course, may not have to write lab reports, primarily because of the large class size, I still believe that students need to write lab reports in a high school chemistry class. I cannot let go of this and I know that a number of my colleagues cannot discard lab reports from their curriculums either. We want students to be able to step back and think about what they have done, why they have done it, what they have learned, where they have made mistakes, and so on. 658
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Figure 1. Two halves of a cut green pepper (with seeds exposed) fluorescing under UV light. See J. Chem. Educ. 2010, 87 (DOI: 10.1021/ed100262t).
These are not simple things for students to do and it requires patient work and guidance on our part to help them learn how to do this. The rewards for teaching students how to do this are great and often do not come until they leave us and go on to college and we hear back from them about their success in a particular course because of skills we taught them. Writing thorough, appropriate lab reports is one of the best skills we can give our students, especially those that want to study science further, even though the benefits are often never fully seen by us. BCCE Conference As Erica and I have been mentioning for the last several months, the 21st Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE) is August 1-5 at the University of North Texas (2). There are high school symposia throughout the conference and I am really looking forward to seeing you there if you are attending. On Sunday afternoon, the symposium Views from the Classrooms of Conant and Regional Award Winners will be presented for the first time and I am very excited. Attendees will have the chance to meet and benefit from award-winning teachers, as well as find out more about how to nominate a teacher for one of these awards and how each award selection process works. We will have a booth in the exhibit hall, so please stop by. All of us at the Journal are really looking forward to seeing you there. Erica's Take on the Issue Fluorescence is the focus of this month's JCE Classroom Activity Connections article (DOI: 10.1021/ed100262t) by MacCormac, O'Brien, and O'Kennedy. Connections articles allow authors to share how they have used JCE Classroom
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Vol. 87 No. 7 July 2010 pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc. 10.1021/ed100498b Published on Web 05/27/2010
Chemical Education Today
Activities both inside and outside of their classrooms, including extensions and customizations to previously published activity procedures. This issue's article lists multiple additional items that students can test for fluorescence, including fruits, vegetables, shells, and credit cards (see Figure 1). I recently stumbled across Patricia McKean's (a past Connections author) reference to another unusual source of fluorescence: scorpions (3). It turns out that fluorescent compounds are part of a scorpion's cuticle, with even fossilized scorpions retaining the fluorescence. This property is mentioned as being helpful for nighttime scorpion hunting. While I do not recommend live scorpions as an extension to the fluorescence activity, showing students photos of fluorescing scorpions from the Web could be an interesting (and less hair-raising) addition.
r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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Precollege Chemistry Featured Article 5MacCormac, A.; O'Brien, E.; O'Kennedy, R. Classroom Activity Connections: Lessons from Fluorescence. J. Chem. Educ. 2010, 87 (DOI: 10.1021/ed100262t). Literature Cited 1. MacNeil, J.; Falconer, R. When Learning the Hard Way Makes Learning Easy: Building Better Lab Note-Taking Skills. J. Chem. Educ. 2010, 87 (DOI: 10.1021/ed100303y). 2. 21st Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. http://www. bcce2010.org/ (accessed May 2010). 3. Sun Up, Sun Down Activity. http://intranet.cshgreenwich.org/ ewebeditpro4/upload/Sun_Up_Sun_Down.pdf (accessed May 2010).
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