Mini-Lab Activities: Inquiry-Based Lab Activities for Formative Assessment

Abstract

Students everywhere love chemistry demonstrations, especially if they involve explosions. But have you ever wanted to move beyond the wow factor and find a way to incorporate active student learning into your demos? What if you could get them to think more deeply about what they're observing, and then find out if they really understand what they’ve experienced? Those questions initiated our quest to create “interactive demos” at the US Air Force Academy Department of Chemistry. Over the past year and a half, this effort has evolved into inquiry-based learning activities. We now refer to these activities as “mini-labs”, because they also contain the additional dimension of a simple formative assessment of a student’s knowledge and awareness of chemical principles. The “Mini-Lab” was conceived of as an idea to help instructors easily add inquiry-based learning activities to their curriculum by providing an array of activities that are easy to implement and not supply-intensive and that are designed around...