The effects of COVID-19 on the delivery of undergraduate chemistry education have been profound and overarching. While chemistry educators rose to this challenge, rapid transitions were seen to have negative impacts on student learning and their overall well-being. In this remote environment, it was often the laboratory components of our courses that were the hardest hit. For most educators, finding meaningful and authentic remote alternatives to the traditional in-person laboratory experience was difficult. How could students remotely learn the hands-on technical skills that our labs are often designed to teach? The solution? Have students critically reflect on the purpose of traditional benchtop chemistry skills, and from there, why each skill we ask them to learn is performed in a specific manner, with the goal of ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data obtained. Students enrolled in a second-year chemistry course (N=50) were asked to watch a series of pre-recorded videos relating to five different analytical skills: pipetting, serial dilutions, weight-by-difference, quantitative transfer, and TLC analysis. The skills were chosen such that they aligned with the skills present in our regular lab experiments. For each skill, two videos were presented; one demonstrating the proper technique, and one with deliberate errors included. After identifying the videos as showing correct or incorrect techniques, students then critically reflected upon the "bad" video, indicating the errors that were found, in relation to the properly demonstrated method, and discussing how the error would impact the accuracy of a subsequent experiment and how they would go about correcting the errors within the technique. In performing this exercise, students not only learned about how each of these traditional chemistry skills would be performed, without physically being in the lab, but also gained an appreciation for the "why's" behind the finer details of performing such skills. The goal of this presentation will be to discuss the overall experience of running these critique videos as laboratory assessments in place of the more traditional hands-on skills development students are used to experiencing. Discussions will focus on the instructor's experience in implementing and grading these new assessments, along with their unintended impacts on the laboratory reports still used within the course, as well as the experiences of the students, collected via anonymous feedback.

Locked out of the lab: Engaging students in learning hands-on laboratory skills within the online environment

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.