Recently, the role and purpose of lab have been questioned. The NRC DBER report notes that the role of laboratory in student learning is relatively unexplored.  Based upon our prior research pertaining to faculty goals for laboratory, we have begun to investigate the students' goals for laboratory so that eventually the perspectives each group and their (lack of) correspondence might be examined.  We will report on our pilot study to examine the students' goals for the undergraduate chemistry laboratory.  Data was collected in the fall semester in both general chemistry and organic chemistry laboratory courses at a large Midwestern research university and a moderate size Midwestern liberal arts university. Students were asked to complete an open-ended response survey to describe their goals for laboratory and how they would achieve them. This data was analyzed and used to generate a survey administered at the end of the semester pertaining to the students' expected and achieved goals for laboratory. The initial analysis and tentative findings from this pilot study will be presented.

Students' expected and achieved goals for the undergraduate chemistry laboratory

246th National Meeting (2013)

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