Learning from Experience:
An "Aesop's Activities" Approach
to Higher-Level Thinking Skills
in the General Chemistry Lab
by Craig Rusbult, Ph.D.
This page has not been revised
since 2001, but the
version on another website has been revised more
recently, so I strongly recommend that you read
THE REVISED VERSIONS OF
Aesop's Activities for Goal-Directed Education
Teaching Scientific Method in Labs
Examples of "Thinking Skills" in Labs
Introduction
(written for a seminar in Chemistry Education, Spring 2000)
I'm hoping that your reading (before
class) and our discussion (in class) will stimulate creative thinking that
will be productive for you personally, and will provide useful feedback
about how we can use discussions to help students learn more from their
lab experiences.
I want to use the class time for discussion
(with minimal introduction by me) so I'll be assuming that you're familiar
with the main ideas. The foundational principles are explained in
the Aesop's Activities page (there is
a link to it below). You can skim this page if you want, quickly grabbing
the basic ideas about personal motivation and
goal-directed design of instruction.
Discussion-based labs are introduced at the end of Section 3, and are examined
in detail on the Discussion-Based Labs page,
which I hope will be the main focus of our discussion in class. Some
examples of "making students aware of their opportunities for learning"
are in the Examples of Activities page;
these activities may seem familiar because they're from labs used at UW-Madison,
now and in the past. You can visit these three pages (and the leftovers)
by using the links below.
newer versions of the first two
pages below
(Aesop's Activities, Discussion-Based Labs)
are available in new locations:
Aesop's and DB-Labs
This is the home-page in a set of pages
that outline a proposal for using
labs to help students learn
higher-level thinking skills.
It contains three main pages:
1. AESOP'S ACTIVITIES
Goal-Directed Instruction and Personal Motivation
(this page is the foundation for "Thinking Skills in Labs")
2. DISCUSSION-BASED LABS
a strategy for helping students learn more from their experience
3. EXAMPLES OF DISCUSSION-BASED
ACTIVITIES
from labs in General Chemistry
and also
leftovers:
some topics from the March 1999 pages
that aren't in the three pages above, including
The Process of Instructional Design
and My Personal Goals.
the URL for the page you're now reading is
http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~crusbult/methods/labs.htm
The home page for my website,
Strategies for Problem Solving:
Using Creativity and Critical Thinking
in Science, Design, and Education
Mainly for archival purposes
(since most of the content in these two pages
is in the four pages of the current version),
here are the original pages from March 1999:
ORIGINAL HOME PAGE
This is an educational proposal that was presented
in a poster session at a national meeting of the
American Chemical Society, on March 21, 1999.
A LONGER VERSION
of the educational proposal.
.