Awarded Teaching Essays
Achieving Higher Efficiency in Chemistry Labs Using Electronic Scheduling
In the fall semester of 2013, I was a graduate student instructor for Chemistry 112A, a course designed for students majoring in chemistry. It was apparent that a high level of time management in class was critical to students’ success in the course. Chemistry 112A had a five-hour lab section every week. The workload was intensive, but it was supposed to fit into the given time. However, in the first few weeks of the semester, students had difficulties in finishing all the work on time. Most of them knew what to do in the lab by attending lab lectures and writing down the procedures in the pre-lab writing. The real problem was that the students followed the procedure literally, without thinking about the purposes of each step. As a result, they wasted the limited time on observing unimportant processes. For instance, a student might wait for a tube of cold water to boil, when he or she could spend the time on another step and come back to check the water when it started bubbling.
I saw the need to improve the students’ efficiency without causing too much intervention in their independent thinking. Inspired by the Google calendar, I asked my students to write down in the pre-lab writing the step(s) they planned to work on during each hour of the lab. They could opt to input this plan into their cell phone calendar, which typically showed reminders when a set time arrived. By fulfilling this task, they were instructed to imagine the whole lab process, and then break it down into five intervals of time. They were asked to find out what glassware would be used and to get it ready beforehand rather than at the last minute. I hoped that this would help them understand what steps could be done simultaneously. They would also consider how to most efficiently split tasks with lab partners for group work.
In order to teach the students how to make valid plans, I wrote my suggested schedule on the board for their reference for the first few weeks. I also wrote comments on their planned schedule in their lab reports every week, and returned the reports within a week while they had a fresh memory of the past lab. I often wrote positive words to encourage them, as positive feedback could go a long way towards building confidence and making progress. In addition, I walked around the lab to encourage students to keep up with their planned schedules, and gave advice to those who fell behind their schedule. I paid special attention to let them know which steps required more attention to perform precisely, e.g. adding a specific amount of a chemical; and which steps are less important but might be beneficial if done in advance, e.g. cooling down some water in an ice bath to prepare ice-cold water for product washing.
These analyses required in-depth understandings of the lab procedure as well as specific lab techniques. It was not easy at the beginning, but students did an increasingly better job as they practiced and as they received my feedback from lab reports. All the expected goals of the pre-lab scheduling were achieved gradually. Students made use of time efficiently, and they were able to finish the labs on time. The quality of the lab reports increased as well, as they had more time available to write down observations and to work on the discussion questions. Student feedback in the form of a confidential mid-term teaching evaluation also confirmed that the students perceived this process as an effective tool for improving their productivity in the lab. Many of them expressed appreciation for how I “challenged the class to think critically.”
Prompting Critical Thinking through Metacognition and Electronic Scheduling
Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2015
Students often struggled to finish labs on time. So much attention to lab steps detracted them from learning the concepts the labs were to demonstrate. I asked students to make a schedule for their lab activities ahead of time, and suggested a way for them to track their progress during the lab using cellphone apps. Students became more proficient in lab over time and were able to focus more on discussion and reflection on the labs, which translated into better observations and better conceived lab reports.
The success of the strategies my students implemented can be explained as applications of metacognition, a decision-making strategy through self-monitoring and self-regulation. Schoenfeld (2011) explains metacognition through this example: Given a mathematical problem, novices often spent little time reading the problem and jumped right into fruitless calculations, which could go on forever; experts, however, devoted much more time to cognitive tasks such as analyzing the problem, planning and implementing strategies, and oscillating between strategies to avoid getting stuck in one cognitive process. As novices in a chemistry lab, my students needed strategies to plan, schedule, and think through their lab processes so their efforts would be better placed. My pre-lab scheduling assignment helped them to learn and apply metacognition in the lab.
When making their schedules, they analyzed the lab as a whole, just like reading and analyzing a mathematical problem. In the actual lab, their schedules gave them references to judge progress in their goal-oriented searching and periodically reminded them of their current goal (Azevedo and Cromley 2004). In addition, students’ plans served as self-imposed deadlines. Experiments have shown that self-imposed deadlines, though not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines, were useful in enhancing task performance and controlling procrastination, for example chatting with classmates on irrelevant topics (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).
I would apply several additional steps to refine my pre-lab activity. Metacognition could create stronger results if I explicitly tell students that their lab skills will develop over time, as those who understand this simple concept show increased motivation to learn and improved grades (Lovett, 2008). Also, I will try to implement a deadline in the lab. For example, I could make a rule that students should finish all experimental work half an hour before the lab time ends, so that they can only use the remaining time for lab report writing. This rule enforced by me will act as an externally imposed deadline, and it will ameliorate students’ performance over their self-imposed deadlines (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).
Another useful tool to extend student learning is a wrapper. A wrapper is an activity that surrounds an existing assignment or activity (Lovett 2008). Wrappers are designed for teaching self-monitoring behavior, requiring students to frequently assess the effectiveness of their learning activities. Wrappers will not only expand the application of metacognition for students, but also help me better evaluate the effect of my teaching strategy on student learning. I will use technique wrappers and lab wrappers. For a technique wrapper, I will give each student a card to ask them how confident they are before using a technique, for example thin layer chromatography, and inquire how well they actually do after they finish the step. This exercise will probably help students know better the extent of their mastery of the technique. It will help me assess my teaching from a microscopic point of view, and determine whether my demonstration on this technique is adequate or not. Similarly, I will ask them to fill out a lab wrapper. They will write down what they actually do in each hour of the lab, and compare with their planned schedule. They will reflect on any mistakes they make in the lab, or any unnecessary delays in the lab procedure, and think about how to avoid these issues in the future. Meanwhile, I will be able to assess student learning from a macroscopic perspective by reading the lab wrappers. Wrappers will require minimal time, but will provide valuable information on teaching assessment for instructors.
References
Ariely, Dan and Wertenbroch, Klaus. May 2002. “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” Psychological Science 13.3: 219–224.
Azevedo, Roger and Cromley, Jennifer G. 2004. “Does Training on Self-Regulated Learning Facilitate Students’ Learning with Hypermedia?” Journal of Educational Psychology, 96:3, 523–535.
Lovett, Marsha. 2008. “Teaching Metacognition.” Presentation to the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, 29 January 2008.
Schoenfeld, Alan. How We Think: A Theory of Goal-Oriented Decision Making and Its Educational Applications. New York: Routledge.
Schoenfeld, Alan. 2011. “Learning to Think Mathematically (or like a scientist, or like a writer, or…).” GSI Teaching & Resource Center video. Presentation to the How Students Learn Working Group, UC Berkeley, March 22, 2011. http://gsi.berkeley.edu/programs-services/hsl-project/hsl-speakers/schoenfeld/.