Goal-Directed “Thinking Labs”

Here are three pages (by Craig Rusbult, PhD) about designing goal-directed Science Labs to achieve the educational goals of helping students learn Scientific Ideas-and-Skills:

 

Using Labs to teach Thinking Skills – Examples & Principles  (with examples from General Chemistry Labs)

 

Develop a Creative Community for Lab Education  —  note: This link opens two pages, one specifically for lab-teaching communities (on left side) and another (on right side) for general communities of any kind.  If you want to open only one page (for example, if you're viewing on a small-screen tablet or phone) you can open only one page, for either Lab-Teaching Communities or General Communities.

Teaching, Learning, and Grading in Science Labs examines principles for designing goal-directed lab education, with goals of helping students learn useful skills, including Scientific Method.  In this page, one focus is examining the pros & cons of different ways to do-and-grade labs, comparing traditional labs (with a written report that is graded) with discussion-based labs (designed to help students learn more during the lab) and with various kinds of hybrid labs that try to combine useful features from different lab-teaching strategies.  —  note: If you want, instead of using the two-page link you can open only the page for Learning-Teaching-Grading.

 

And more generally,

Goal-Directed Designing of Curriculum & Instruction is a basic strategy used by most teachers.  How?  They search for thinking-and-learning activities (in current labs, or added to current labs, or in new labs) that will give students experience with valuable ideas-and-skills that are worthy educational goals;  and they develop teaching methods that will help students learn more from their experiences.