Beyond Density: An Inquiry-Based Activity Involving Students Searching for Relationships

Abstract

This paper describes an inquiry-based laboratory activity for introductory chemistry students that goes beyond the traditional displacement of density experiments found in the literature and commercial laboratory manuals. The activity shows how teachers can allow their students to design their own experiments in order to determine the relationships between an object's properties and the volume of water that object displaces. Through an analysis of their data, students construct for themselves three important physical relationships: (i) increasing an object's area doesn't affect the volume of water displaced by the object (composition and mass constant), (ii) the volume of an object equals the volume of water displaced by the object, and (iii) different substances have different volumes when mass is constant. As students perform this activity they act like scientists: they design their own experiments, control variables, take measurements, represent their results in tables and graphs, and make claims based on an analysis of their results.