Using the Science Writing Heuristic in the General Chemistry Laboratory To Improve Students' Academic Performance

A two-semester longitudinal study investigated the effects of a laboratory instructional strategy—the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH)—on improving student academic performance in the lecture portion of the course. The SWH approach helps students do inquiry science laboratory work by structuring the laboratory notebook in a format that guides students to answer directed questions instead of using a traditional laboratory report. In this approach, students must make a claim (inference) about what was learned through the laboratory experiment and provide evidence to support that claim. Then, through reflection, students continue to negotiate meaning from the experiment(s) they conducted. Successfully implementing the SWH requires a student-centered learning environment. In this study, the instructors were rated on how well they implemented the SWH approach and inquiry. The hypothesis under investigation was that the more proficiently an instructor engages students to do collaborative inquiry and the SWH approach, the more effectively students learn. The results of this study indicate that students whose laboratory instructor proficiently implements the SWH approach earn more total points in the lecture portion of the course compared to students who have a laboratory instructor who does not fully implement the SWH approach. The data also show that the SWH approach helps students entering the course with low chemistry content knowledge to succeed in the course compared to students who were not taught using the SWH approach.