Peer Instruction in the General Chemistry Laboratory: Assessment of Student Learning

804 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 83 No. 5 May 2006 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org It is generally accepted that laboratory work is an integral part of an undergraduate education in chemistry. Many recent attempts to reinvigorate the lab course, especially at the general chemistry level, have the general aim of promoting a more active approach by the students. There is much interest in changing the format of the lab, from an expository (cookbook) approach to a more inquiry-based format, in which the students are responsible for designing some aspect of the experiment (1). Others have emphasized the critical role of the teacher (2). It has also been suggested that organizing the students into small teams can lead to improved satisfaction with lab because of the increased communication that occurs (3). One approach (4), which has been applied recently in an attempt to improve student learning and understanding, is Workshop Chemistry (the Peer-Led Teaching and Learning model). In this model, students work in small, somewhat collaborative groups, each group taught and facilitated by an advanced undergraduate, who has previously taken the course and performed well. In most implementations of this model, the session has centered on a worksheet of challenging problems in general or organic chemistry, to be discussed and solved; experimental work has been less central. As one of the founder institutions in the Workshop Chemistry project, the University of Pittsburgh has utilized this model in a general chemistry recitation setting since 1995. In 1998, we extended the model to a subset of the general chemistry laboratory sections. In this paper, we describe the format of the Workshop Chemistry labs and compare them with the conventional labs in our general chemistry program. We also present an assessment of the types and extent of learning in the Workshop labs based on a detailed analysis of students’ performance on end-of-term lab exams. Ours is the first systematic investigation of the effectiveness of a Workshop Chemistry approach to improving student learning in a laboratory setting.