By hosting a college students' laboratory skills contest, we provide an interesting activity for students to cultivate good laboratory practices and thereby improve their laboratory skills. The substance of this contest is the detection of the hardness of water, which involves numerous laboratory skills such as solution preparation, weight by…

In undergraduate science education, laboratory courses stand as essential cornerstones of experiential learning. Chemistry laboratory courses offer students unique hands-on experiences that bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. The journey through the undergraduate chemistry curriculum is paved with a series of…

Due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), universities were restricted from gathering students for in-person instruction, especially teaching hands-on techniques in microbiology laboratory courses. This report describes how a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) transitioned to remote learning for microbiology laboratories through a model, PRUTE,…

Descriptive statistics involves summarizing and organizing data so that they can be easily understood. Even though these are basic and simple concepts, many applied science students have misconceptions about their use in applied experiments in the laboratory. Students usually receive limited or no training in how to understand the meaning of the…

Current research suggests that students often fail to focus equally on the three aspects of scientific argumentation (cognitive, epistemic, and social) when they are given an opportunity to engage in argumentation. This study examined student argumentation within a two-semester general chemistry laboratory sequence at East Carolina University to…

Experimental design is a desirable outcome of laboratory education. Incorporating inquiry into the laboratory curriculum is attractive, but there are acknowledged concerns from practical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, and these are accentuated in upper-division courses. In this work, we draw on the extensive literature relating to…

Practical classes are an important and essential part of undergraduate programs in Chemical Engineering, as each experiment provides an opportunity to reinforce the theory of discrete unit operations that are taught elsewhere in the course. While an expensive pedagogical method, when practical sessions are delivered well, they can be one of the…

Assessment is a central component of course curriculums and is used to certify student learning, but it can also be used as a tool to improve teaching and learning. Many laboratory courses are structured such that there is only a grade for a particular laboratory, which limits the insights that can be gained in student learning. We developed a…

This study developed a web-based multimedia assessment system (WMA system) and applied it to science laboratory instruction. The goal was to improve students' knowledge acquisition under science laboratory instruction. The developed system enabled learners to perform self-assessments by responding to multimedia technology test items online. The…

In this exploratory qualitative study, we describe instructors' self-reported practices for teaching and assessing students' ability to troubleshoot in electronics lab courses. We collected audio data from interviews with 20 electronics instructors from 18 institutions that varied by size, selectivity, and other factors. In addition to describing…