The College Board is in the process of rewriting the curriculum for science courses to make them more inquiry-based. This has prompted me to revisit my process for converting conventional “cookbook” labs to inquiry format.
Note: since writing this post, I have subsequently written a more detailed manual for Developing Inquiry-Based Laboratory Experiments in High School Chemistry.
One of the legacies from my mom is that I try to be unfailingly positive with my students, and I encourage and expect the same from them. I have a set of classroom signs that I post all around the room, many of which are meant to inspire/remind students about their attitudes and behavior toward one another. If students say things that are disparaging to one another or themselves, I pause the class for a quick reminder. (The reminder is friendly, positive, and often humorous, which allows the student(s) to save face.) Frequently I find myself pointing to the sign that says “All observable data must support the hypothesis that you are nice.” or the one that says “If you can’t say something nice about yourself, don’t say anything about yourself at all.”
There seems to be a consensus among AP Chemistry teachers that the test has gotten significantly easier than it was a decade or more ago. However, if we take a score of 5 to mean the equivalent of an A in a college gen chem course, I suspect that hasn’t changed. I think the bigger problem is that an A in college gen chem doesn’t mean what it used to.
Memorizing something essentially means changing it from something you need to think about into something you can do quickly without thinking. Sometimes this is desirable, sometimes not.
One of the labs I do with my Chemistry I class is to measure the temperature and volume of a gas under two sets of conditions, and, based on Charles’s Law, extrapolate the graph to estimate the temperature of absolute zero. Every year, I get students who have had calculators and computers plot their graphs for so long that they can’t plot one by hand. Continue reading
On Monday, I was talking with one of the middle school teachers in the city where I teach. I happened to mention one of my pet peeves—the fact that kids in middle school appear to get promoted to the next grade every year, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually mastered the skills for their grade level. The teacher’s response surprised me.
If I remember my adolescent psychology correctly, Jean Piaget claimed that the average child develops abstract (“formal operational”) thinking around age 16—exactly the age most high school students take their first chemistry course. Since 2003-04 (the year that Massachusetts’ MCAS tests became a graduation requirement for that year’s sophomores), I’ve seen a steady decline in the proportion of my students who are able to achieve the ability to think abstractly and set up and solve complex problems by the end of the year. Continue reading
On the AP-Chem listserv, Adrian Dingle remarked:
“I prefer pilots that ‘pass’ the test EVERY time they attempt to land an aircraft, not the second time they try.”
Personally, I’d rather fly with a pilot who has had problems and learned from them. Continue reading
Almost four years ago, I posted the original Peel & Eat Kleenex: I Double Dog Dare You! story.
A couple of weeks ago, I told the story to my department chair. Being a scientist, she decided that she needed to try one. She was able to taste the citric acid (sour/lemon taste), but not the SDS (also known as sodium lauryl sulfate, which has a bitter taste). She commented that this was interesting, because she also doesn’t taste PTC. (The ability to taste PTC and other related bitter flavors is genetically inherited. Many biology teachers pass out paper soaked with PTC when they teach genetics.)
There’s an insidious misconception that the ability to reliably get the right answer to a question must be evidence that the student thoroughly understands the topic.
