A disconnect between staff and student perceptions of learning: an ACELL educational analysis of the first year undergraduate chemistry experiment ‘investigating sugar using a home made polarimeter’

This paper describes an educational analysis of a first year university chemistry practical called ‘Investigating sugar using a home made polarimeter’. The analysis follows the formalism of the Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) project, which includes a statement of education objectives, and an analysis of the student learning experience. The practical requires students to accurately prepare solutions of known concentrations of a common consumer chemical (sucrose), and then investigate the interaction between these solutions and plane-polarised light. The instrument used is a “home built” polarimeter which students assemble, allowing them to recognise that scientific apparatus need not be mysterious in its operation or construction. Student feedback data were conducted using the ACELL Student Learning Experience (ASLE) instrument. Analysis of the data shows that overwhelmingly students rate the experiment as “worthwhile” or better. However, many also rate the experiment as “boring” or “uninteresting”. By contrast, staff and student feedback at an ACELL experiential workshop rated the experiment very highly in terms of the “interest” criterion. In this contribution we discuss this alignment of staff and student perceptions of various elements, including “interest” and explore the correlation with the overall laboratory experience.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2011/RP/C0RP90015J

Sock it too, them

Richard Branson's blog recently described a story about an entrepreneur who said he wanted to be so successful that he would never have to wear socks ever again. I thought this was a rather intriguing goal and it raises some interesting questions. First, is there a scale of success measurable by the items you no longer have to wear? Would one be deemed even more successful than the sock-less if they didn't have to wear a watch, for example? I am already successful enough that I hardly ever have to wear gloves, certainly not in a professional context anyway. What about shoes? Hats? and is it limited to clothing? What about deodorant? Am I more, or less, successful if not wearing deodorant? It also makes me wonder about those who cannot wear socks; I mean, if one had no feet - one would not wear socks - and therefore be deemed a success. If you set the benchmark for success at being sock-less are you at liberty to wear a single sock when you are half-way to your goal? I can only imagine that it won't be long until we are surrounded by successful people - all  wearing short pants, putting their feet up on the table, casually picking at their toenails - just to ensure that we are all aware of their newly acquired sans-socks-status.

Sock it to them