This study sought to understand the impact of gender and reasoning ability on students’ perceptions and performances of Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) laboratory tasks in a high school chemistry laboratory. Previous literature has reported that students at all levels have not developed the specific knowledge and skills that were expected from their laboratory work. Also, although boys have been more successful than girls in physical science and mathematics courses, this gap seems to be narrowing. This research was conducted at a mid-western, rural high school where the participants were 24 boys and 25 girls enrolled in physical science classes taught by the same teacher. The outcome variables used in the quantitative methods were POE performances and perceptions of the chemistry laboratory environment. MANOVA statistics revealed significant main effects in which formal-reasoning students outperformed their concrete counterparts, while females surpassed males on the outcome variables. Several qualitative oral and written methods were used to derive themes. The majority of these themes indicated that students both understood and enjoyed participating in the POE learning tasks. Implications and recommendations were described. The authors would like to thank Bryce Hach and Hach Scientific Foundation for their support.

High school students' perceptions and performances on predict-observe-explain tasks in chemistry laboratory

249th National Meeting (2015)

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