Recent research has been focused on understanding how students engage in argumentation in the chemistry laboratory environment with a particular emphasis on the quality and structure of arguments (claims, evidence, and rationale).  Despite these efforts, little has been done to characterize the impact of various laboratory factors on student ability to reason with experimental data and core chemical concepts and ideas.  Previous work has begun to tell the story of these laboratory factors by exploring how the framing of a laboratory experiment impacts the nature of student argumentation.  Our ongoing work adds to this narrative by beginning to characterize the impact of the type of laboratory experiment on student reasoning.  As students navigate a semester of their organic chemistry laboratory course, they engage in opportunities to make sense of different types of experimental data in support of their claims about their laboratory findings.  Differences in the amount and type of data present as well as the varying degrees of cognitive demand characteristic of each experiment are hypothesized to impact the focus and approach to reasoning students invoke in their post-laboratory arguments.  In this research project, student written arguments are qualitatively analyzed for both domain-specific and domain-general features to explore the differences observed between types of laboratory experiments.  The findings from this study are expected to contribute to our understanding of the impact of various components of the chemistry laboratory on a student’s ability to reason with experimental evidence and core chemical concepts and ideas.

Exploring the impact of laboratory experiment type on the nature of student argumentation

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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