Del Carlo

Dawn I. Del Carlo, an assistant professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, N.J., spoke to these issues during the American Chemical Society national meeting in New Orleans last month. Del Carlo's paper was coauthored by her Ph.D. adviser, Purdue University's George M. Bodner. It was presented during a symposium hosted by the Division of Chemical Education to honor Bodner, winner of the society's 2003 George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education.

To collect data for her study, Del Carlo observed and interviewed nearly 100 chemistry majors, ranging from freshmen to graduate students, and assessed their attitude toward academic dishonesty in the lab. She examined students' perceptions of their classroom lab experience and how they compared it with "real world" experience that the students obtained through internships and undergraduate research activities in industrial and academic research labs.

The students, who were remarkably candid in describing their attitudes, placed little value on classroom lab work. The students viewed lab exercises as a tedious undertaking that had to be endured in order to pass a course, Del Carlo told C&EN.

An experiment was merely "something that the professor dictated that they needed to do," she explained. "The lab manual instructed them how to do it--sometimes even told them the answer that they were supposed to get." In addition, "students didn't think that what they were doing in the classroom counted as real science." They felt that their classroom lab experiences didn't represent the way that science transpires in the real world.

As a result, the students "didn't have a sense of ownership over these experiments" and didn't believe the experiments were important. So when they knew what answer they were supposed to get, they might nudge their data in a direction to obtain that result. "If you're looking at a meniscus, and you're estimating between 0.05 and 0.1 mL, and you know that it's supposed to be closer to 0.1, that issue of bias comes in," Del Carlo said. Or if students were missing data, they might get them from someone else in the lab. Students were also liable to fill in their lab notebooks with guessed-at data after a lab was finished rather than with observations taken during an experiment.

How can professors increase the value students place on the classroom lab experience and limit the likelihood they'll cheat?

Offering a lab makeup period would relieve some of the pressure on students, Del Carlo believes. That way, students who blow an experiment could redo it instead of feeling they had to fudge or copy data.

Inquiry-based or discovery-based labs that don't provide all the instructions and answers and hence engage the students' curiosity are another good way to motivate them not to cheat, Del Carlo said. Classroom experiments designed this way provide "more of a problem-solving situation, which is more realistic in terms of what happens in an academic or industrial research setting."

An example of such experiments would be to ask younger students to "figure out the volume of this room using the tools in your lab drawer," Del Carlo said.

More sophisticated students could be asked to judge how much azide would be needed to equip an airbag installed in a car of a particular size. "You don't give them any introduction to stoichiometry," Del Carlo said. "That's something they have to go and research."

That kind of problem appeals to students because it relates to something in their own lives. "It's not something that only chemists would be able to appreciate," Del Carlo explained.

The students Del Carlo interviewed also indicated that they enjoyed independent lab projects. One popular project called for students in an introductory inorganic course to figure out the identity of each of the compounds in a mixture of unknowns. "They could look up any information they wanted, and they were let loose in the lab for two weeks," Del Carlo said. "It was a huge puzzle, a way for them to enjoy chemistry because it was something that they had to figure out on their own. They were given independence, and that gave them a feeling of ownership."

AN UPPER LEVEL advanced instrumentation class required students to come up with a problem to solve using any of the instrumentation techniques that they had learned either in class or elsewhere. If the chosen procedure didn't work, they had to develop another one.

In both cases, "the students adored the experiments," Del Carlo said. "It was the first time they got excited about what they were doing. All of the students said the experiments were really difficult, but at the same time, that's why they got into chemistry. That was really what they thought chemistry was all about--getting in there and playing with things."

Del Carlo, who took on the dishonesty project for her doctoral dissertation, is part of a rare breed: She's an educational researcher with a Ph.D. in chemical education. In earning her doctorate, she took the same chemistry courses and qualifying and cumulative exams as her fellow chemistry grad students. But Del Carlo received training in educational research methods through courses offered by the department of curriculum and instruction in Purdue's School of Education.

Chemists don't typically understand what such training is good for. "Historically, chemistry departments have been in charge of developing their own curriculum, even though they're not necessarily trained in education," Del Carlo said. Indeed, she credits traditionally trained chemists with having done "a lot of really good work" in education. So it's understandable that many of them "don't see how a chemistry educator fits in within the department."

Del Carlo explained that her mission extends beyond coming up with creative lab experiments. "A lot of times, educational research can be geared toward how our students process information, and that can then lead to curriculum development," she said.

Such research fostered the current enthusiasm for guided-inquiry labs that are rooted in the theory of constructivism (C&EN, March 10, page 45). According to this view, "students need to construct their own knowledge in order to learn it," Del Carlo said. "It has to be a much more active process than just sitting in lecture and listening." Once educational researchers had worked that out, they realized they needed to "integrate group work and active learning into the classroom. We need to change experiments so they are less didactic and less cookbook-type exercises."

Improvements can be as "simple as changing the title of an experiment so it doesn't give away the answer," Del Carlo said. Instead of "Determining the Chemical Formula of CuO," for instance, an experiment could be retitled "Determining the Chemical Formula of a Metal Oxide." Rather than spoon-feeding students with information they're not likely to absorb, engage their curiosity. "You've taken this piece of copper and heated it, and all of a sudden it's gained mass," Del Carlo said. "Well, what's happened?" In questing for the answer to these kinds of questions, students can be introduced to mass relations, the laws of definite proportions, and the reactivity of metals with oxygen.

Del Carlo is continuing her research into attitudes about chemistry and academic dishonesty by observing students in high school. Her preliminary results show that the younger students hold views similar to those in university. "That supports a need for inquiry-based experiments at the high-school level as well," she concluded.

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