INTEGRATING LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT IN LABORATORY WORK

Abstract

One of the requirements of employees by laboratory managers is that they have good practical skills and thus the teaching of these skills in an undergraduate course is essential. Traditionally laboratory work has been closely tied to individual lecture courses in order to support theory. At The Robert Gordon University, considerable care has been taken to devise a laboratory programme, which follows a progression of assessment and learning strategies. We have created separate laboratory modules, which are suitable for development of various transferable skills (e.g. written and oral communication, numeracy, IT, organisational skills including time management) as well as integration and application of material covered in other parts of the course. In this paper we describe our programme of laboratory work and assessment, and we discuss the problems and issues raised from the teaching of laboratory work. Traditionally laboratory work has only been assessed by laboratory reports but here we describe alternative forms of assessment and the possible benefits and outcomes from such an approach. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.: 2003, 4, 67-75]