Rethinking the Goals of the Laboratory through Students’ Experiences: Findings from 114 Hours of Fieldnotes in the Laboratory

There are a variety of laboratory learning activity designs in chemistry that all represent different intended goals of the instructor. Past work shows that students’ goals during laboratory learning activities do not align with the instructor’s intended learning outcomes (framed as goals) and has studied students’ achievement on assessments of those learning outcomes. In our study, we apply a different framing, one which assesses the laboratory design by comparing what students are asked to do for the learning activity with what they can actually do during the laboratory and the assessment. By taking this framing, we can begin to understand if the design of our laboratory learning activities and assessments even makes it possible for students to achieve the instructor’s learning outcomes. In this study, we undertook ethnographic fieldnotes of students’ experiences during the laboratory, focusing on students’ actions and the questions they were asking. Through our analysis, we situate the findings into the culture of chemistry as a discipline, practical restrictions in the context of the experiment and its assessment, and students’ lived experiences learned from interviews after the course. What laboratory learning activities represent is more complex and nuanced than what the instructor intends. Future designs need to account for students’ situated experiences and align with instructor learning outcomes and assessment. This study invites educators to consider what is possible for students during their laboratory time and provides an approach for educators to examine their own practices.