The ACELL project: Student participation, professional development, and improving laboratory learning

The Australian Physical Chemistry Enhanced Laboratory Learning (APCELL) project (Barrie, Buntine, Jamie and Kable 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), and its all-of-chemistry successor, ACELL (Read, 2006a) are examples of contemporary efforts to meet the challenge of engaging students in laboratory activities which are both chemically and educationally sound. The project is collaborative; it overcomes many of the significant constraints imposed by the unavailability of time from individual teachers, by drawing on the resources and expertise of multiple institutions as well as chemical and pedagogical expertise. The project continues to produce a range of tangible outcomes, including chemistry education research publications, a database of freely available tested experiments, and pedagogical design tools (all available from http://acell.chem.usyd.edu.au/). Objective evidence is required to support the putative notion that the A(P)CELL concept is of benefit to educators as they design and evaluate laboratory programs; collection and evaluation of such empirical data is essential if views such as those of Hawkes (2004) are to be effectively challenged. In this paper we report on the views of staff and student delegates to the February 2006 ACELL Educational Workshop

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The ACELL project: Student participation, professional development, and improving laboratory learning

The Australian Chemistry Enhanced Laboratory Learning (ACELL) project is designed to help improve the quality of learning in undergraduate laboratory exercises. This is achieved through two interlocking mechanisms. The first aims to build a database of experiments that are both chemically and educationally sound. These experiments are tested in a third party laboratory (usually through an ACELL workshop) to ensure that they work, and all materials necessary to run the experiment are peer-reviewed by both academic staff and by students. 33 experiments were submitted for evaluation at the most recent workshop (February 2006), from 27 different universities from Australia and New Zealand. Workshop testing of the experiments was completed by a team of 33 academic staff and 31 students from those universities. Student participation is integral to the ACELL process, ensuring that the students' perspectives are heard. The second mechanism aims to provide professional development for both staff and students, and is also run through the workshop process. Testing of experiments is undertaken by all delegates acting as students and actually doing the experiment. Evidence shows that this provides staff with a valuable reminder of laboratory work from a student's perspective, whilst also allowing students to better understand laboratory work from a staff perspective. In addition, the workshop process includes discussion of educational issues, both in abstract (through discussing laboratory learning in general) and concrete terms (through evening debrief sessions of each experiment tested). Involving students in the peer review process for final acceptance to the ACELL database not only ensures that experiments cater to the students' needs, but also provides those students with experience in reviewing others' work - a rare experience at undergraduate level.Justin R. Read, Mark A. Buntine and Geoffrey T. Crisp, The University of Adelaide, Simon C. Barrie, Adrian V. George, Scott H. Kable, The University of Sydney, Robert B. Bucat, The University of Western Australia and Ian M. Jamie, Macquarie Universit

What makes a good laboratory learning exercise? Student feedback from the ACELL project

Over the last seven years, a group of Australian universities have been collaboratively running a chemistry education project, now called ACELL (Advancing Chemistry by Enhanced Learning in the Laboratory). One of the key aims of ACELL is to facilitate the development and evaluation of educationally-sound chemistry laboratory exercises with the goal of improving the quality of students’ learning in the laboratory environment in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the world. As part of this project, ACELL has developed an instrument for investigating students’ perceptions of their laboratory learning experiences. To date, ACELL had collected data on 22 experiments from 1042 students across 8 universities in Australia and New Zealand using this instrument, and this data collection is ongoing. As a consequence, ACELL is in an unusually good position to identify and discuss both procedural and cognitive factors that influence students’ evaluation of their laboratory learning experiences, such as assessment, the quality of notes, interest, and the inclusion of opportunities for independent learning. Our results are both surprising and encouraging, and indicate that students can be highly cognitively engaged, even with traditionally ‘boring’ content, provided a suitable learning environment is established. This presentation will describe the research approach undertaken, discuss the range of factors which appear to significantly influence students’ learning experiences, and consider the implications for the design of educationally-sound chemistry laboratory exercises.Mark A. Buntine, Justin R. Read, Simon C. Barrie, Robert B. Bucat, Geoffrey T. Crisp, Adrian V. George, Ian M. Jamie, Scott H. Kabl