Laboratory work: the teachers' perspective

We describe a case study of an in-service professional development project with four experienced biology teachers in two upper secondary schools. The objective was to better understand the role of laboratory work (labwork) in science education with a special emphasis on assessment. Research questions include the following: 1. What does the teacher want to achieve with the labwork and how do the students perceive it? 2. How do biology teachers assess labwork? 3. How did the in-service project motivate teachers to change their assessment methods? 4. Are the assessment criteria in the Swedish national syllabus applicable to labwork? Data were collected during a semester-long in-service project. Laboratory instruction sheets were collected and analysed both with respect to intended learning outcome and assessment skills. Questionnaires to teachers and students about the intended learning outcome were carried out after different experiments. Finally, teachers were interviewed concerning the role of labwork and their assessment methods and also their reflections on the results of the in-service project. The teachers realised that their assessment methods require more transparency to become effective. The interpretation of intended learning outcomes of experimental work differs between students and teachers.

[1]  B. Fraser,et al.  Assessment and investigation of science laboratory skills among year 5 students , 1995 .

[2]  L. Shepard.  The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture , 2000 .

[3]  Kenneth Tobin,et al.  International handbook of science education , 1998 .

[4]  Pinchas Tamir,et al.  Practical skills testing in science , 1992 .

[5]  Daniel S. Domin,et al.  A Review of Laboratory Instruction Styles , 1999 .

[6]  Chris R. Brown.  An Evaluation of Two Different Methods of Assessing Independent Investigations in an Operational Pre-University Level Examination in Biology in England. , 1998 .

[7]  D. Yip,et al.  Teachers' Concerns on school-based assessment of practical work , 2005 .

[8]  William J. Hoese,et al.  Diffusion activities in college laboratory manuals , 2005 .

[9]  Vincent N. Lunetta,et al.  The Laboratory in Science Education: Foundations for the Twenty-First Century , 2004 .

[10]  Susan M. Brookhart,et al.  Successful Students' Formative and Summative Uses of Assessment Information , 2001 .

[11]  Guillermo Solano-Flores,et al.  On the development and evaluation of a shell for generating science performance assessments , 1999 .

[12]  Carolyn S. Wallace,et al.  Secondary science teachers' use of laboratory activities: Linking epistemological beliefs, goals, and practices , 2005 .

[13]  Andrée Tiberghien,et al.  Varieties of Labwork: A Way of Profiling Labwork Tasks , 2002 .

[14]  D. Boud.  Assessment and learning: contradictory or complementary? , 1995 .

[15]  Hans Niedderer,et al.  Issues and Questions Regarding the Effectiveness of Labwork , 2002 .

[16]  Abbie Brown,et al.  Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in c , 1992 .

[17]  Clive Sutton,et al.  New Perspectives on Language in Science , 1998 .

[18]  Christina Ottander,et al.  Teachers view of learning outcome and assessment of laboratory work in Swedish upper secondary biology classes , 2005 .

[19]  The contradiction between teachers' instructional goals and their assessment practices in high school biology courses , 1996 .

[20]  Vincent N. Lunetta.  The School Science Laboratory: Historical Perspectives and Contexts for Contemporary Teaching , 1998 .

[21]  Andrée Tiberghien,et al.  An analysis of labwork tasks used in science teaching at upper secondary school and university levels in several European countries , 2001 .

[22]  Norman G. Lederman,et al.  Developing views of nature of science in an authentic context: An explicit approach to bridging the gap between nature of science and scientific inquiry , 2004 .

[23]  Michael Bassey,et al.  Practical Work in School Science , 1963 .