In the Laboratory
When Learning the Hard Way Makes Learning Easy: Building Better Lab Note-Taking Skills Joseph MacNeil* and Renee Falconer Department of Chemistry, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15232 *
[email protected] Our chemistry department is strongly committed to the use of guided-inquiry learning (1-4); however, we find that students are often hesitant to participate for fear of being wrong. Many students have never been exposed to this method of teaching before and initially feel it is unreasonable to expect them to think about chemically themed questions when they do not yet fully grasp the classroom concepts. In response to this, we now introduce activity-based protocols with a topic that does not require any specific technical knowledge: how to create and maintain a functional lab book. This Journal first weighed in on the importance of this topic in 1933, with a five-part symposium covering the importance of laboratory notebooks from secondary schools to academic and industrial research (5-9). In the real world of science, good notetaking 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 (10-12). Broad consensus holds that these documents should be both detailed and extensive, chronicling not only the data from experiments, but also a record of the ideas, sources of inspiration, and even the puzzled musings of the active scientist. Like Da Vinci's journals, science notebooks should be the travelogue of the journey, not merely a stamped passport. While the merits of a well-kept lab notebook are universally embraced, the structure of a university lab course is rarely conducive to the spontaneous development of these skills. Accustomed to lab manuals that provide detailed and explicit step-by-step instructions, even good students may come to view labs as things you “do”. Although they may be very good at following directions, they are often lax at documenting their results, and unaccustomed to thinking in real time about the significance of what they are seeing. The distinction drawn between lab notebooks and lab reports may further exacerbate the problem to the extent that students eventually see the lab report (or its equivalent) as the finished product and the lab notebook as merely a convenient place to record data. In this environment, giving students guidelines on the proper structure of the lab notebook and expecting them to excel is rarely sufficient. While collecting and grading student notebooks is a common strategy for encouraging good notetaking, we have found it to be more effective to help students grasp the “why” behind proper documentation, while gaining comfort with asking questions in the process. Experimental Section We often tell our students that a good lab notebook forms a record that should enable someone else to repeat their experiment. This lab effectively puts that to the test, by having students
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first perform one of a trio of fun, easy experiments, then switching to a new experiment and being asked to complete it using only the notes of the students who immediately preceded them. By making the actual experiments short and engaging, students are able to concentrate on the lesson to be learned, proper documentation is essential, in a positive way. The supporting information provides extensive notes on four of the experiments we have used: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Non-Newtonian liquids Paper chromatography Preparation of glue and ink from household ingredients Temperature-indicating liquid crystals
The exact experiments can be anything that can be done in about 30 min (based on completing three within a 3-h lab period, while still allowing time for discussion). This flexibility allows the instructor to retain the essence of the concept in labs across the secondary and postsecondary spectrum. Before coming to lab, students are asked to read the background material in their lab manual discussing the theory of the three “experiments” they will be doing (procedures are not provided). In a previous lecture, students were taught the proper format for recording lab notes. To begin, students are divided evenly across three stations, one for each experiment. At each station there are supplies, several copies of procedures, and a set of questions to answer. The students are given approximately 30 min to proceed then told to clean their stations and leave everything (including original procedures and questions sheets) and rotate to the next station. At this point, the instructor removes the original procedure pages from each station and asks each student to give a copy of their lab notes to a colleague beginning the experiment they have just completed. After allowing the students 10 min to, as a group, try to piece together information from the various lab notes, the instructor stops the students to discuss what they found. Typical discussion questions include: • Does any single notebook have enough detail to follow? • Can students follow the procedure after combining several different sets of notes? • What important information is included? What is missing? • How detailed are the notes? Do they make sense? • Are the questions and resultant data written in the lab notebooks?
The instructor then reiterates the importance of good note taking, what details should be included, and what can be reasonably left out. Students are given the original procedure sheets and told to do the second station experiments, keeping in
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r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemicval Education, Inc. pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc Vol. 87 No. 7 July 2010 10.1021/ed100303y Published on Web 05/06/2010
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In the Laboratory
mind what they have just learned. As the students rotate to the third experimental setup, the instructor again collects the original procedure sheets and tells the students to do the experiment at the final station using the remaining lab notes. After the students have time to look over the lab notes from the previous group, the instructor extends the questioning. • Was a big difference evident from the first set of lab notes to the second set? • Was information still missing that would have been good to have in the notes? • What did you learn from this?
Students are given the rest of the lab to finish the third experiment. The lab notes for the third experiment are collected for grading and students are asked to not give away “the secret” to students in subsequent sections. As the specific activities provide only the backdrop for the lab, they can easily be adapted to other settings. We have provided four sample experiments in the supporting information. Hazards The experiments described in the online supporting information mainly use common household chemicals. Hazards posed in these experiments are outlined in the supporting information documentation. Attire and safety protocols appropriate for the individual experiments should be used at all times. Discussion As a tool for introducing students to the art of keeping a science notebook, this laboratory has parallels with “The Lego Exercise” published by Bradford Pendley in this Journal (13). We have used our model for 6 years in both our general chemistry and nonscience major science courses. This illuminating laboratory is popular with the students, who enjoy the experiments and think it provides an easy introduction to the new lab setting. Student cohorts have now moved on through the fourth-yearlevel integrated laboratory sequence. When discussing notetaking skills in the upper-level lab, students clearly remembered their first-year experience. It has also been observed that students who have completed all their labs at our institution take more extensive notes than transfer students. This lab exercise also facilitates comfortable discussion between students and with the instructor, as they easily understand the essential message about note taking. That said, this lab derives its effectiveness from the shock value of taking away the instructions that students have always relied on and that they were implicitly allowed to believe would still be there for them. This is the “a-ha” moment and the instructor needs to be prepared for a variety of initial reactions, ranging from humorous to hostile. It is important to let the students struggle for at least a little while. In most instances, trying to recreate the procedures is truly futile, but some lab groups can succeed in piecing together enough information to work from. For the groups that can move forward, it is an excellent learning moment; they are working collaboratively and thinking through ideas. The key is to keep everyone calm enough to stay on task without treating the challenge as nothing more than a practical joke. The differences between the first station notes and notes from the second and third stations are easily discernible to the 704
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students. The second time around, students need very little prompting to answer the instructor's questions about what is needed in the lab notes based on this experience. Having students draft a new question for the following group also helps to draw these students into the experiment as participants. Discussing the actual questions they compose can help students learn to move from merely observing (What was the texture of the solid?) to thinking about how observations provide new clues (Why was the material sticky to the touch?). Surprise is the key element in this procedure; without it, the impact is significantly reduced. We ask each student to pledge not to reveal the secret and have been pleasantly surprised by how willingly they comply; we do not see any significant change from the first lab group to the last, or from one year to the next. As lab note taking is universally practiced in every observation-driven field, this laboratory design is easily adapted to most any course. We do the lab very early in the semester of the student's first laboratory experience, but it could be done at any time and at any level of course from high school to upper-level college. Conclusions It is important to understand the need for explicit and complete lab notes and this skill becomes increasingly necessary as students progress into more self-directed investigation. By engaging students in a laboratory with fun experiments, we allow them to discover for themselves the usefulness of a good set of lab notes while easing them into situations where they need to think and act more independently. The flexibility of the experiments allows the instructor the freedom to schedule and arrange the lab to fit their specific needs. Acknowledgment The authors wish to thank the students of CHM 109 and COR115 for their eager participation and valuable feedback. Literature Cited 1. Ford, J. R.; Prudente, C.; Newton, T. A J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 929–933. 2. Kipnis, M.; Hofstein, A. Int. J. Sci. Math. Educ. 2008, 6, 601–627. 3. Fay, M. E.; Grove, N. P.; Hamby Towns, M.; Lowery Bretz, S. Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. 2007, 8, 212–219. 4. Hofstein, A.; Nayon, O.; Kipnis, M.; Mamlok-Naaman, R. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 2005, 42, 791–806. 5. Segerblom, W. J. Chem. Educ. 1933, 10, 403–404. 6. Hopkins, B. S. J. Chem. Educ. 1933, 10, 404–408. 7. Baker, R. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1933, 10, 408–411. 8. Rose, R. E. J. Chem. Educ. 1933, 10, 411–412. 9. Rakestraw, N. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1933, 10, 412–413. 10. Meagher, T. F.; Copeland, R. G. Res. Manage. Rev. 2006, 15, 1–13. 11. Taylor, K. T. Curr. Opin. Drug Discovery Dev. 2006, 9, 348–353. 12. Eisenberg, A. J. Chem. Educ. 1982, 59, 1045–1046. 13. Pendley, B. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1065.
Supporting Information Available Notes for instructors are available. This material is available via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
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r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemicval Education, Inc.
