Reflection: Two Related Labs - Student Inquiry and Performing a Separation

December 14, 2007

Mentor's Name: Nate Fairchild

1. What worked for you in this Inquiry? Having the students develop the concepts for a separation lab was a success. Viewed as a pure inquiry lab, it succeeded, measured by the existence of procedures created and run by the students. The class produced three procedures which I typed up and copied. When they met for the next lab, each team could choose from one of these three procedures.

2. Did you have any challenges? Group work was not as successful as I hoped. The plan was for each group to produce a liquid-solid-separation procedure, have it reviewed by me, and run it in the actual hands-on lab. That didn't work well. What happened was that there was a big variation in the quality of "scribing" in each groups. Two or three on-the-ball students wound up carrying the whole load with modest participation from everyone else. This meant that I didn't have enough procedures for each group to use theirs. Instead, I took the procedures that were submitted, reproduced them and let groups choose which to use. This worked well in that each group had usable procedures to choose from. However, the idea that they'd create a procedure (an inquiry-based task, for sure) and see it through to the conclusion, really didn't work.

Another problem is that the on-the-ball students don't want to be put with those who do no work. Yet clustering the no-workers is a recipe for a zero outcome.

3. Based on your work in this Inquiry, what are your next steps? Monitor group work more closely. More important that that is to set group work expectations and have them run through more of that kind of work to get the hang of it.

Since I ran this lab with these shortcomings, I have run another group-intensive lab. Much has changed. I brought in two other adults and a senior student teaching assistant to help. I produced a handout kit with copies of the inquiry lab, group work expectations, and a group work rubric. I carefully grouped students in groups of four, with a couple of threesomes to be accompanied by my adults. Then, I explained how the groups were expected to do their tasks and that they would rotate the well-defined roles for each of the four lab iterations.

That worked a whole lot better!

4. What did you like about this Inquiry, and do you have any suggestions for improving it? I liked that the Inquiry requires me to focus and organize the labs. Of course it is more work to do a reasonably thorough prep job, but it pays off. This means that the Inquiry is a self-discipline system as well as a feedback system.

Site Title: *S Effective Labs Science INQUIRY
Site ID: Effective Labs Science INQUIRY

Assignment: Mentee Self Reflection
Assignment Due Date: Dec 1, 2007 5:00 pm

Student: Mark Bell( bellm )

Submission ID: abe54823-8a29-4d21-80f8-70d90b3551e9
Submitted on: Dec 15, 2007 12:14 am

Submitted Text: