Accurately describing students' experiences in the chemistry laboratory can be a very difficult task. While surveys serve as useful assessment tools, they tend to either overestimate or underestimate students' true feelings about their laboratory experiences. Conducting interviews affords researchers the opportunity to hear students voice their opinions in their own words. However, one problem with this method is that students may not possess the vocabulary to adequately describe their experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct interviews that allow students to verbalize their feelings about learning in the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. To this end, interviews were conducted with students who had completed the Meaningful Learning in the Laboratory Inventory (MLILI - an assessment that measures students' cognitive and affective experiences in the undergraduate chemistry laboratory). Students who were enrolled in either a general chemistry or an organic chemistry laboratory course volunteered to be interviewed. During the interview, students were presented with a list of affective words. Students were asked to indicate which words most accurately reflect their personal laboratory experience using Livescribe technology to track their responses, and to share detailed descriptions of situations that evoked any of the feelings listed, in addition to stating the frequency with which that feeling occurs during laboratory. Participants were also asked to indicate which words were not related to their laboratory experience and explain why. Preliminary results of this study will be presented.

In their own words: An analysis of students' attitudes towards chemistry lab

247th National Meeting (2014)

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