Abstract
The teaching of sciences has long been associated with practical work; an instructional tool that is believed to be effective in terms of both promoting learning as well as making the teaching of sciences enjoyable. However, empirical evidence on its effectiveness as a teaching method and whether it has any affective value for undergraduates is still lacking, when it has been deemed as one of the costliest aspects of science education. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a mixed-methods case study conducted at a British university to examine the perceived aims of practical work as well as the effectiveness of practical work on conceptual understanding and motivating undergraduates according to the academic staff of a life sciences department. For the qualitative data presented here a questionnaire was administered to the academic staff who, along with Year 1 and Year 2 undergraduates, were interviewed and also observed during practical work classes. The preliminary findings showed that the perceived aims of practical work by the academic staff vary across years, while the observations revealed two types of lessons in which the importance of providing theoretical scaffolds during experiments so as to help undergraduates in linking concepts and theories with observables was prominent.
Highlights
Practical work has been a didactical tool that had been for long, and unquestionably, appreciated by teachers and academics for its inclusion in the biology and life sciences curriculum in secondary and tertiary education respectively
This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a case study conducted at a British university to examine the perceived aims of practical work, the effectiveness of practical work in terms of promoting undergraduates’ conceptual understanding and in motivating them in their studies according to academic staff of a life sciences department
Even if we do not learn things in detail or sometimes do not know what we are doing, we will go home, and we will recall what we saw in the lab and make sense of what we learned later. These preliminary findings show that the effectiveness of practical work was related to the academic staff’s intentions when designing the tasks
Summary
Practical work has been a didactical tool that had been for long, and unquestionably, appreciated by teachers and academics for its inclusion in the biology and life sciences curriculum in secondary and tertiary education respectively. Fifty-seven years after the publication of Kerr’s ten suggested aims of practical work, [4], studies have shown that secondary school and university practical work [5,6] share the similar aims of conceptual understanding promotion, development of skills and motivation [1,2]; the main difference between the two being that secondary school education prioritises, at least for the first two years [4], the affective value of practical work over its effectiveness on conceptual understanding The importance of such aims is acknowledged by graduates and practising scientists who stressed the importance of practical skills development and the comparative insignificance of its affective value [7]. Students’ examination grades are converted into numerical values that correspond to UCAS Tariff points that universities refer to for their students’
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