A series of studies over a six-year period compared the performance of general chemistry students using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) to the performance of students using a traditional format on lecture exams and on laboratory practical exams. The SWH approach incorporates active learning, guided-inquiry, group work, and a different structure for the laboratory notebook in a format that guides students through a laboratory experiment. In the SWH approach, students must pose questions to investigate, make a claim (inference) about what was learned through the laboratory experiment and provide experimental evidence to support that claim. Then, through group discussion and reflective writing, students continue to negotiate meaning from the experiment they conducted. Subjects in these studies were students enrolled in various first and second semester general chemistry courses for science and engineering majors. The American Chemical Society (ACS) national standardized California Chemistry Diagnostic Test, the ACS First Semester and Second General Chemistry Exam (depending upon the year of the study), and the instructor-made final exam were used as pre-tests and post-tests. Chemistry graduate students serving as teaching assistants (TAs) were given a workshop on how to teach using the traditional approach and the SWH inquiry approach. TAs taught the lab sections either using the SWH approach or the traditional approach. In each of the studies, students using the SWH format out-performed students using the traditional format on chemistry exams administered in the lecture component of the course and on most laboratory practical exam tasks. Female students using the SWH format out-performed female students using the traditional format. |
