Surveying Students' Attitudes and Perceptions toward Guided-Inquiry and Open-Inquiry Laboratories

Inquiry-based laboratory experiments can play an important role for students in developing concepts and promoting deeper understanding. This study examined students' ability to differentiate between guided- and open-inquiry laboratories near the end of a semester of general chemistry at a large southwestern university that utilized both types of inquiry laboratories. Students were asked to identify new scenarios as guided inquiry, open inquiry, or neither. The study also investigated the students' attitudes toward both types of inquiry laboratories they had performed during the semester, and whether students perceived that they learned more with a guided-inquiry or an open-inquiry laboratory. Results indicated that ∼ 78% of the students could identify guided-inquiry laboratories, while ∼ 54% could identify open-inquiry laboratories; only ∼ 46% could identify both guided- and open-inquiry laboratories correctly. Further, students preferred doing guided-inquiry labs compared to open-inquiry labs, and they thought they learned more with guided-inquiry labs.